"An American Type": The end of Henry Roth: Over the last 20 years, Henry Roth has evolved from an elderly long-silent prodigy, after the manner of Harper Lee, to a posthumous prolific cottage industry -- a kind of upmarket L. Ron Hubbard, but with genius instead of E-meters. Roth's great autobiographical immigrant novel "Call It Sleep" came out in 1934, that hinge year for American literature when Dashiell Hammett published his last novel, Raymond Chandler his first short story, and Upton Sinclair left off writing just long enough to run a doomed but influential campaign for the California statehouse. Amid all these doings and more, a 28-year-old son of the Lower East Side created what for many remains the first classic novel of becoming an American.
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