SOURCE: "Henry Roth's Call It Sleep: The Revival of a Proletarian Novel," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 12, No. 3, October, 1966, pp. 123-30.

In the following essay, Ledbetter discusses the relationship between Roth's Call It Sleep and other proletarian novels of the 1930s. He asserts that "Roth's achievement is a novel first, and a proletarian one only secondarily."

The recent publication of a paperback edition of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep and the prominence afforded a review of it in The New York Times Book Review can hardly be construed as a revival of proletarian literature in the United States; our generation remains properly skeptical of the rabid commitment and simple slogans spawned by the confusion of political, economic, and literary values in the 1930s. Such hack work as Mary Heaton Vorse's Strike! and Clara Weatherwax's Marching! Marching!—indeed, the whole body of proletarian melodramas that once were hailed enthusiastically...