The American author Henry Roth was born in Galicia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Ukraine). He was born to Jewish parents that moved to New York’s Lower East Side when he was two years old in 1908. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, graduating in 1924, and City College, which was where he started his career as an author. He was awarded a degree in English in 1928 and became a novelist a few years later when he was already known as an "intellectual Socialist" and member of the Communist Party. The poet Eda Lou Walton encouraged Roth to read James Joyce’s Ulysses; it made a great impression on the young author and Roth realised that he too was able to write similar stories based on his own life. He was by now living together with his older, wealthy lover. Walton was an intellectual woman who taught at the University of New York. She was also his mentor while he was working on his first novel, Call it Sleep, which was published by a small publisher in 1934.