An American Type

Roth, Henry

ISBN 10: 1441749594 ISBN 13: 9781441749598

Publisher: Blackstone Pub, 2012

Synopsis

Follows the Depression-era story of Ira Stigman, a thirty-two-year-old novelist who becomes enamored with a blond, aristocratic pianist and abandons his Manhattan family for the promise of the sunny American West.

About this title

Review

Starred Review. A passionate, life-embracing conclusion to Roth s bold and cathartic magnum opus. --Donna Seaman"

A passionate, life-embracing conclusion to Roth s bold and cathartic magnum opus.--Donna Seaman"

A passionate, life-embracing conclusion to Roth's bold and cathartic magnum opus.--Donna Seaman

An absorbing Depression-era love story, but what gives it special interest is the light it sheds on Roth's lost years.--Steven G. Kellman

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Discovered in a stack of nearly 2,000 unpublished pages by a young New Yorker editor, this is the final novel by Henry Roth, whose Call It Sleep was published in 1934 and who “staged the literary comeback of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work was edited by Willing Davidson, a fiction editor at The New Yorker.|Discovered in a stack of nearly 2,000 unpublished pages by a young New Yorker editor, this is the final novel by Henry Roth, whose Call It Sleep was published in 1934 and who “staged the literary comeback of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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Blackstone Pub
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1441749594
• ISBN 13: 9781441749598
• Binding: Audio CD