Henry Roth, Mercy of a Rude Stream Volume 1: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park

Stacy Mulder (Ball State University)
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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 Stream

reader with a story that is at once both sordid and uplifting.

The first volume of the Mercy series, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris

2021 words

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 02 December 2024.]

16592 Mercy of a Rude Stream Volume 1: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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