Alva Review-Courier -

With “Call It Sleep” becoming a best-selling novel in 1964, Henry Roth was suddenly back on the American literary scene. He was inundated with fan mail and bombarded with requests for interviews and speaking engagements.

One of the offers he received was to be a resident scholar at a retreat in New Mexico. He and his wife liked the area so much that they relocated there. And, while extra money was coming in from royalties and speaking fees, they were far from rich; their new residence was a mobile home in an Albuquerque trailer park.

Meanwhile, Roth was also attracting lots of attention in Europe, the continent on which he was born, as his novel was translated into several European languages. As we saw previously, Roth eventually received a prestigious Italian literary award, becoming something of a celebrity there.

That honor resulted from the influence of a university professor named Mario Materassi who translated “Call It Sleep” for Italian readers and edited a volume of scholarly critiques of the novel.

Eventually, Materassi conceived the idea of having Roth collect all of his short stories and nonfiction essays, along with letters and transcripts of interviews, into a book.

Roth liked the idea but insisted upon Materassi being the editor of such an assemblage. The volume was completed and published in 1987, more than two decades after “Call It Sleep” had become a best-seller.

Some critics did not like the compilation of short prose, primarily because parts of it had no literary value. A good example is an article Roth published about preparing birds for market in “The Magazine of Ducks and Geese!”

Other readers, however, applauded the book for gathering Roth’s short stories in one collection and also because some of the nonfiction pieces gave insight into the author’s evolving views on such topics as politics and being a Jewish immigrant in the United States.

The book also had another, unintended but welcome consequence: it helped Roth begin writing fiction again! We will look at the results of that next week.