Henry Roth An American Type-美国类型

作者：Henry Roth

书名：An American Type《美国类型》

英文简介：Set in the dire year of 1938, the novel reintroduces us to Roth’s alter-ego, Ira Stigman, a 32-year-old novelist, eager to assimilate but psychologically traumatized by the scars of his impoverished immigrant past. Restless with his older lover and literary mentor, the renowned English professor, Edith Welles, whose obsessive love has crippled him, Ira, a “slum-born Yiddle,” journeys to Yaddo, the famed writer’s colony, where he meets a blond, aristocratic pianist, whose inherent nobility and “calm, Anglo-Saxon radiance” engages him.


The ensuing romantic crisis, as well as the conflict between his ghetto Jewish roots and the bourgeois comforts of Manhattan, forces Ira to abandon the comforts of his paramour’s Greenwich Village apartment. In his relentless search to become a writer, a husband and an American, Ira heads West with an illiterate, boorish Communist, on an illusory quest for the promise of the American West. Thumbing rides from gruff truckers, riding the rails with hobos through the Dust Bowl, Ira explores America’s inherent splendors and its Depression tragedies as he returns home, uncertain if he will marry M., questioning if he’ll ever be able to make anything of his lapidary prose.