Background
According to his autobiography, Stone Walls Do Not, Roth was born in 1893 in Nustscha, in the Carpathian Mountains of Galicia. He immigrated with his family to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1897, at the age of four. In New York he was working by age eight as an egg chandler (holding eggs up to a candle to see if they were fertilized), a newsboy by 10 and a baker by 14. At 16 he was working for the New York Globe as the Lower East Side correspondent. When the latter folded Roth became homeless, but continued writing and publishing, and even attended Columbia University for a year on scholarship. After Columbia he opened a bookstore, the Poetry Shop in the West Village and began his first magazine, Beau.
Read more about this topic: Samuel Roth
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