Henry Roth died on October 13, 1995, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the age of eighty-nine. Born in the village of Tysmenitz, in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galitzia, in 1906, it is most likely that Roth landed at Ellis lsland and began his life in New York in 1909. In 1914, the year in which Mercy of a Rude Stream opens, the family moved from the Lower East side to Harlem, briefly to the Jewish section on 114th Street and then to non-Jewish 119th Street.

Roth lived there until 1927, when, as a junior at City College of New York, he moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a prominent critic, poet and New York University instructor. His first novel, Call It Sleep was published in December 1934, to mixed reviews and did not become the American classic that it today until its paperback printing in 1964. Roth contracted for a second novel with the editor Maxwell Perkins, of Charles Scribner & Sons. But his growing ideological frustration and personal confusion created a profound writer's block, which lasted until 1979, when he began the first drafts of Mercy of a Rude Stream.

While still alive, Roth received two honorary doctorates, one from the University of New Mexico and one from the Hebrew Union College -- Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio. Posthumously, he was honored in November of 1995 with the Hadassah Harold Ribalow Lifetime Achievement Award and by the Museum of the city of New York in February of 1996. From Bondage, Volume III of Mercy of a Rude Stream was a finalist in fiction for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Books by Henry Roth

Mercy of a Rude Stream Series

by Henry Roth