In 1992, author Henry Roth broke an authorial silence of nearly sixty years by publishing the first novel in the four-volume series entitled
Mercy of a Rude Stream. The four novels—
A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park,
A Diving Rock on the Hudson,
From Bondage, and
Requiem for Harlem—together combine to form something of an epic in their depiction of Ira Stigman, an aging author writing the story of his own troubled teenage years during the early part of the twentieth century; Stigman's tale is a near duplicate of Roth's own story. Offering a writing style quite different from that see in his first work,
Call It Sleep, Roth provides the
Mercy of a Rude Streamreader with a story that is at once both sordid and uplifting.
The first volume of the Mercy series, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris
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Citation: Mulder, Stacy. "Mercy of a Rude Stream Volume 1: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 October 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16592, accessed 23 April 2024.]
