Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - 1994

"Mercy of a Rude Stream" by Henry Roth - St. Martin's Press:


1 "A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park" by Henry Roth - St. Martin's Press, New York - Vol I - 1994 first thus American edition - 18cmx15cm - condition: very good, in dustwrapper

2 "From Bondage" by Henry Roth - St. Martin's Press, New York - Vol III - 1996 first thus American edition first printing - 18cmx15cm - condition: very good in dustwrapper

3. "Requiem for Harlem" by Henry Roth - St. Martin's Press, NY - Vol IV - 1998 first thus American edition first printing - 18cmx15cm - condition: very good in dustwrapper

Mercy of a Rude Stream is a monumental epic published in four volumes. It follows protagonist Ira Stigman from his family's arrival in Jewish-Irish Harlem in 1914 to the night before Thanksgiving in 1927, when Ira decides to leave the family tenement and move in with Edith Welles. According to critic David Mehegan, Roth's Mercy represents a "landmark of the American literary century".[6]

The first volume, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park was published in 1994 by St. Martin's Press and the second volume, called A Diving Rock on the Hudson, appeared from St. Martin's in 1995. In A Diving Rock on the Hudson, "Roth writes graphically about the sexual relationship between the protagonist, Ira Stigman, and Stigman's sister, Minnie, as teen-agers. Roth also describes an incestuous relationship between Stigman and his cousin, Stella." Roth's sister "chastise[d] Roth for writing about the 'revelation'" and "threaten[ed] to sue him and St. Martin's Press.... Roth and his sister entered into a contract in which he agreed to pay his sister $10,000 in exchange for immunity from legal action. The contract ... also stipulated that future volumes of Roth's novel would no longer portray Minnie Stigman 'as having any further sexual relationship with her brother, Ira Stigman.'"[7]

From Bondage, which appeared in hardcover in 1996, was the first volume of the four Mercy books to appear posthumously. Requiem for Harlem, the fourth and final volume, appeared in 1998. Roth was able to revise both the third and fourth volumes in 1994 and 1995 with the help of his assistant, Felicia Steele, shortly before his death.

Before his death, Roth commented numerous times that Mercy of a Rude Stream comprised six volumes. In fact, Roth did write six separate books. He called the first four "Batch One," and the last two, "Batch Two." Roth's editor at St. Martin's, Robert Weil, along with Felicia Steele, Larry Fox, and Roth's agent, Roslyn Targ, found the epic would be best served in four volumes, as the four books of "Batch One" contained a stylistic and thematic unity inconsistent with the remaining two books.

Explaining the difference between Mercy of a Rude Stream and Call It Sleep, critic Mario Materassi, Roth's longtime friend, argues that "Call It Sleep can be read as a vehicle through which, soon after breaking away from his family and his tradition, young Roth used some of the fragments of his childhood to shore up the ruins of what he already felt was a disconnected self. Forty-five years later, Roth embarked on another attempt to bring some retrospective order to his life's confusion: Mercy of a Rude Stream, which he has long called a 'continuum,' can be read as a final, monumental effort on the part of the elderly author to come to terms with the pattern of rupture and discontinuity that has marked his life".[6]

Fran Lebowitz, writer and public intellectual, in her Netflix special "Pretend It's a City" speaks about how you can still appreciate the art of an individual separate from his actions