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Article: Henry Roth on the road of sexual experience
- Article from:
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Article date:
- June 9, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1996 Chicago Sun-Times. (Hide copyright information)
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From Bondage
By Henry Roth. St. Martin's Press. $25.95.
If he had never written anything other than his 1934 novel, Call It
Sleep, Henry Roth would have earned a permanent place in American
literary history. That book remains the classic work about the
immigrant experience in the early decades of this century.
But in the final decades of his long and complicated life,
Roth, who died last October just before his 90th birthday, embarked
on a massive series of quasi-autobiographical novels. And read
together, they form a wondrous, disturbing and ruthlessly honest
chronicle of the complex and often wrenchingly twisted process of
assimilation.
Published under the collective title Mercy ...