Disavowing Call It Sleep, his widely celebrated masterpiece, as the work of another man, Henry Roth in 1979 began at the age of seventy-four to compose Mercy of a Rude Stream, a four-volume American epic, set between 1914 and 1928, for which he hoped to be most remembered. Hailed as “provocative as anything in the chapters of St. Augustine or Rousseau” (Los Angeles Times), Roth’s bildungsroman depicts the travails and sexual awakenings of an immigrant boy named Ira Stigman, whose twisted exploits are recalled by a haunted and chastened older man in fits of intensely lyrical, Proustian-like memory. Twenty years after the initial publication of the first volume of this “extraordinary work, one arguably unparalleled in American letters” (Philadelphia Inquirer), Mercy of a Rude Stream is, as Roth envisioned, finally unified, a powerful testament to the unflagging faith and literary genius of one of America’s greatest twentieth-century writers.