Requiem for Harlem — Henry Roth

Completed just months before Henry Roth's death, the four-volume works of Mercy of a Rude Stream has become an epic American literary event. Here, in Requiem for Harlem, Roth tells the psychologically lacerating love story of Ira Stigman, a senior at City College, who has fallen for Edith Welles, NYU professor and muse of modern poets. Set both in the fractured world of Jewish Harlem and in the bohemian maelstrom of Greenwich Village, Requiem for Harlem provides a fitting epitaph that concludes the literary exodus that propelled Roth from alienation to artistic and personal redemption.