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Henry Roth (February 8, 1906 – October 13, 1995) was an American novelist and short story writer. ==Biography== Roth was born in Tysmenitz near Stanislawow, Galicia, Austro-Hungary (now known as Tysmenytsia, near Ivano-Frankivsk, Galicia, Ukraine). Although his parents never agreed on the exact date of his arrival in the United States, it is most likely that he landed at Ellis Island and began his life in New York in 1908. He briefly lived in Brooklyn, and then on the Lower East Side, in the slums where his classic novel ''Call It Sleep'' is set. In 1914, the family moved to Harlem. Roth lived there until 1927, when, as a senior at City College of New York, he moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and New York University instructor who lived on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. With Walton’s support, he began ''Call It Sleep'' in about 1930, and completed the novel in the spring of 1934, publishing in December 1934, to mixed reviews. In the 1960s, Roth's ''Call It Sleep'' underwent a critical reappraisal after being republished in 1964. With 1,000,000 copies sold, and many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, the novel was hailed as an overlooked Depression-era masterpiece and classic novel of immigration. Today, it is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Jewish American literature. After the book's publication, Roth began a second novel that was contracted with editor Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner’s. But Roth’s growing ideological frustration and personal confusion created a profound writer’s block, which lasted until 1979, when he began the earliest drafts of ''Mercy of a Rude Stream'' (although material written much earlier than 1979 was also incorporated into this later work). In 1938, during an unproductive sojourn at the artists’ colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, Roth met Muriel Parker, a pianist and composer; much of this period is depicted in Roth's final work, ''An American Type.'' Roth severed his relationship with Walton, moved out of her apartment, and married Parker in 1939, to the disapproval of her family. With the onset of World War II, Roth became a tool and gauge maker. The couple moved first to Boston with their two young sons, Jeremy and Hugh, and then in 1946 to Maine. There Roth worked as a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant in the state mental hospital, a waterfowl farmer, and a Latin and math tutor. Roth did not initially welcome the success of the 1964 reprint of ''Call It Sleep'', valuing his privacy instead. However, his writing block slowly began to break. In 1968, after Muriel’s retirement from the Maine state school system, the couple moved to a trailer home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, near where Roth had stayed as writer-in-residence at the D. H. Lawrence ranch outside of Taos. Muriel began composing music again, while Roth collaborated with his friend and Italian translator, Mario Materassi, to put out a collection of essays called ''Shifting Landscape'', published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1987. After Muriel’s death in 1990, Roth moved into a ramshackle former funeral parlor and occupied himself with revising the final volumes of his monumental work, ''Mercy of a Rude Stream''. It has been alleged that the incestuous relationships between the protagonist, a sister, and a cousin in ''Mercy of a Rude Stream'' are based on Roth's life. Roth's own sister denied that such events occurred. Roth failed to garner the acclaim some say he deserves, perhaps because after the publication of ''Call It Sleep'' he failed to produce another novel for sixty years. Roth attributed his massive writer's block to personal problems such as depression, and to political conflicts, including his disillusion with Communism. At other times he cited his early break with Judaism and his obsessive sexual preoccupations as probable causes. Roth died in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States in 1995. The character E. I. Lonoff in Philip Roth's ''Zuckerman'' novels (''The Ghost Writer'' and ''Exit Ghost'' in this case), is a composite of Roth, Bernard Malamud and fictional elements.〔Joshua Cohen, "A Life Torn Between Myth and Fact," The Forward, October 2, 2007〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Henry Roth」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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