Call It Sleep was first published in 1934, but it was not until 1956 that it got the recognition that its great qualities deserve.
Through the eyes of David Schearl, the son of immigrant Jews, the reader is taken into the teeming jungle of a New York city sium; noisy, brutal, rat-infested, with its own special language.
But it is on the developing mind of the child himself that Roth mainly concentrates - his inexplicable terrors, his love for his mother and his fear of his father, his disgust at the discovery of sex and the unwitting poetry of his thoughts as he puzzles out the imponderables of childhood. David is small, weak, inadequate and terrified, but he is endowed with profound imagination; and, finally, after an accident that nearly kills him, he experiences a single, unifying vision of acquiescence in life.