ABSTRACT
Henry Roth is the author of one book, Call It Sleep, which was published in December 1934, received a number of very good notices from responsible readers and was promptly lost in the shuffle of new books. According to the author himself, its first edition numbered only 1,500 copies, its second 2,500 copies. There were no other editions until 1960, when a new, well-printed and well-bound edition in cloth came out “graced” by three separate introductions, by Harold Ribalow, Maxwell Geismar and Meyer Levin. It was greeted politely in some quarters, received scant attention in most others, was reviewed favorably by some of the same people, like Marie Syrkin, who had spoken of it glowingly before, and was certainly far from a smashing success. It was not until the paperback edition came out some years later that it appeared on the map of general public literary consciousness, became a best-seller for a time and has continued to be a very good seller ever since.
