from wikipedia:

Roth was born in Tysmenitz near Stanislav, Galicia, Austro-Hungary. His first published novel Call It Sleep (originally published in 1934) achieved a second life since its re-publication and critical re-appraisal in the 1960s when it sold 1,000,000 copies and was hailed as an overlooked Depression-era masterpiece and classic novel of immigration. It is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Jewish American literature. Call It Sleep was dedicated to his then mistress and muse, Eda Lou Walton.

After the book's publication, Roth began and abandoned a second novel and wrote several short stories. In the early 1940s he abandoned writing, and moved from New York to Maine and later New Mexico, and worked as a firefighter, laborer, and teacher, among other occupations, before retiring to a trailer park in Albuquerque.

Roth originally didn't welcome the new-found success that Call It Sleep received, valuing his privacy instead. However, he soon began to write again, at first short stories. At the age of 73, he began work on a series of novels that grew to six volumes, with final editing completed shortly before his death. The first four of these were published (two of them posthumously) as a cycle called Mercy of a Rude Stream while the last two manuscript volumes remain unpublished. He died in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States in 1995.

Roth failed to garner the acclaim some say he deserves, perhaps because he failed to produce another novel for sixty years. His massive writer's block after the publication of Call it Sleep is often attributed to Roth's personal problems, such as depression, political conflicts, or his unwillingness to confront events in his past that haunted him, such as having incestuous relationships with both his sister and cousin, which are written about in the later work.

Joseph Mitchell (July 27, 1908 - May 24, 1996) was an American writer who wrote for The New Yorker. He is known for his carefully written portraits of eccentrics and people on the fringes of society, especially in and around New York City.

...Mitchell's account of Gould's extravagantly disguised case of writer's block, published as Joe Gould's Secret (1964), presaged the last decades of Mitchell's own life. From 1964 until his death in 1996, Mitchell would go to work at his office on a daily basis, but he never published anything significant again. In a remembrance of Mitchell printed in the June 10, 1996, issue of The New Yorker, his colleague Roger Angell wrote: "Each morning, he stepped out of the elevator with a preoccupied air, nodded wordlessly if you were just coming down the hall, and closed himself in his office. He emerged at lunchtime, always wearing his natty brown fedora (in summer, a straw one) and a tan raincoat; an hour and a half later, he reversed the process, again closing the door. Not much typing was heard from within, and people who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home. Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained."

Perhaps an explanation does emerge, however, in a remark that Mitchell made to Washington Post writer David Streitfeld (quoted here from Newsday, August 27, 1992): "You pick someone so close that, in fact, you are writing about yourself. Joe Gould had to leave home because he didn't fit in, the same way I had to leave home because I didn't fit in. Talking to Joe Gould all those years he became me in a way, if you see what I mean."

... He died of cancer at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan at the age of 87.