Nathan Asch (July 10, 1902- December 23, 1964), son of the late author, Sholem Asch, was a writer himself. A native of Poland, Nathan Asch took up writing in Paris in the early 1920s and published four novels and non‐fiction work, “The Road: In Search of America,” a study of America in the Depression years.

Prior to his death, Mr. Asch conducted a writers’ workshop at his home in suburban Mill Valley and also at Novato and Hamilton Air Force Base.

“I was born in Warsaw, the son of Sholem Asch, the Yiddish novelist,” Nathan Asch once wrote. “By the time I was 13 and had come to America, my family had lived in Switzerland, Germany, and France.”

Yet in spite of this peripatetic background, and in spite of having a famous father whose works ‘..in Yiddish had Biblical motifs, Nathan Asch became an American writer.

His themes were drawn from the life he saw in this country. His most noted work, published in 1930, was a was-a novel called “Pay Day.”

This was a story of a young Wall Street clerk telling of his thoughts and actions on the day he gets his $30 weekly salary.

Soon after its publication, the book was assailed as obscene by John S. Sumner and his Society for the Suppression of Vice. A hearing was held in New York City at which it was ruled that apart from not being obscene “the bcfok would probably point a moral to young and inexperienced readers.”

“The Road: In Search of America,” written in 1937, received mixed reviews. One critic called its author “a writer of extraordinary sensibility”; another called the work “exceptional as a record of unusual experience and banal in its conclusions.”

In a novel entitled “The Valley,” published in 1935, Mr. Asch told of the lives of a number of Yankee types living in the lower Berkshires.

Mr. Asch also contributed reviews to such magazines as The New Republic, The Nation, and the now‐extinct Dial. He worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter and in Washington as a special assistant for the Works Progress Administration from 1935 to 1937.

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