This study is the first critical biography in English of Sholem Asch, who did little in his lifetime to make such a task an easy one. Asch was not a tidy writer. He lived in many cities and countries, wrote tirelessly, and kept little record of his numerous novels, stories, and essays-much less of the countless Yiddish, Hebrew, and European periodicals and newspapers (most of them now long defunct), or editions and translations, in which his writings appeared.