An American Type: A Novel - Softcover

Roth, Henry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393339920 ISBN 13: 9780393339925

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Synopsis

“His early novel Call It Sleep was his Ulysses. His late work An American Type is his Grapes of Wrath.”―Thane Rosenbaum, Los Angeles Times

This “glorious, evocative, literary novel for the ages” (Los Angeles Times) has finally taken its place within the great canon of American fiction. Set during the Great Depression, against a backdrop of New York’s glimmering skyscrapers and Los Angeles’s seedy motor courts, this autobiographical work concludes the unparalleled saga of Henry Roth, whose classic Call It Sleep, published in 1934, went on to become one of Time’s 100 best American novels of the twentieth century. With echoes of Nathanael West and John Steinbeck, An American Type is a heartrending statement about American identity and the universal transcendence of love.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Discovered in a stack of nearly 2,000 unpublished pages by a young New Yorker editor, this is the final novel by Henry Roth, whose Call It Sleep was published in 1934 and who “staged the literary comeback of the century” (Vanity Fair) with Mercy of a Rude Stream in 1994. Set in 1938, An American Type reintroduces us to Roth’s alter ego, Ira, who abandons his controlling lover, Edith, in favor of a blond, aristocratic pianist at Yaddo. The ensuing conflict between his Jewish ghetto roots and his high-flown, writerly aspirations forces Ira, temporarily, to abandon his family for the sun-soaked promise of the American West. Fast-paced but wrenching, set against a backdrop of crumbling piers, bedbug-infested SROs, and skyscrapers in glimmering Manhattan and seedy L.A., An American Type is not only, perhaps, the last firsthand testament of the Depression but also a universal statement about the constant reinvention of American identity and, with its lyrical ending, the transcendence of love. This posthumous work was edited by Willing Davidson, a fiction editor at The New Yorker.

About the Author:

Henry Roth (1906–1995) spent his early years on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In 1914, the Roth family moved to Jewish Harlem. Roth died in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Willing Davidson is a fiction editor at The New Yorker.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393339920
• ISBN 13: 9780393339925
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 298
• Editor: Davidson Willing