Completed just months before Henry Roth's death, the four-volume works of Mercy of a Rude Stream has become an epic American literary event. Here, in Requiem for Harlem, Roth tells the psychologically lacerating love story of Ira Stigman, a senior at City College, who has fallen for Edith Welles, NYU professor and muse of modern poets. Set both in the fractured world of Jewish Harlem and in the bohemian maelstrom of Greenwich Village, Requiem for Harlem provides a fitting epitaph that concludes the literary exodus that propelled Roth from alienation to artistic and personal redemption.

Praise

"This is Roth's achievement, this double vision of the artist as both young and old man, hungry and regretful, flawed and penitent."--The New York Times Book Review

"There will surely never be another work like Mercy of a Rude Stream. Like the Ancient Mariner, Roth saw his story through." --The Boston Globe

"Roth's novel is the redeeming legacy of a troubled man who was touched by 'that unique, unutterable afflatus of creativity.'"--Atlanta Journal-Constitution

About the Author(s)

Henry Roth

Henry Roth died in New Mexico in 1995. His previous novels include Call it Sleep, one of the greatest novels of this century, as well as A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, and From Bondage.