paper trail

Jun 17, 2010 @ 12:00:00 pm

When Henry Roth died in 1995, he left thousands of manuscript pages behind. The New Yorker published two pieces drawn from the trove, “God the Novelist,” and “Freight,” and a young fiction editor at the magazine, Willing Davidson, shaped the pages into the novel An American TypeAt Slate, Judith Shulevitz questions the posthumous edits, writing "the saddest ending of all would be if Roth's amorphous, neurotic . . . 'sense of life' was precisely what got polished out of his work." Meanwhile, at The National, Sam Munson calls Davidson's sculpting of the novel "heroic," while in Harper's (registration required), Joshua Cohen bemoans the "gentrification of Henry Roth."