Isaac Rosenfeld

Last updated

Isaac Rosenfeld
Born(1918-03-10)March 10, 1918
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
DiedJuly 14, 1956(1956-07-14) (aged 38)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
OccupationAuthor
Children2

Isaac Rosenfeld (March 10, 1918 - July 14, 1956 [1] [2] ) was an American writer who became a prominent member of New York intellectual circles. Rosenfeld wrote one novel (Passage from Home, 1946), which, according to literary critic Marck Shechner, "helped fashion a uniquely American voice by marrying the incisiveness of Mark Twain to the Russian melancholy of Dostoevsky," [2] and many articles for The Nation , Partisan Review , and The New Republic . Some of those articles were posthumously published in a volume titled An Age of Enormity, and his short stories were later published as Alpha and Omega.

Contents

Background

Many of Rosenfeld's short stories revolve around family, and were to some extent inspired by his own Chicago family: his bombastic father, his mother Miriam who died young, his sister, his unmarried aunts. He and his wife Vasiliki had two children, George and Eleni, the latter of which later became a Buddhist nun. He grew up a few blocks from Saul Bellow, [1] and had known him since he was a teenager, when they worked on the same high school newspaper. [3]

He moved in 1941 from Chicago to New York to study philosophy at New York University, dropping out to write fiction after about a year. [2] By the late 1940s, he was immersed in the philosophy of Wilhelm Reich, "the errant Freud disciple turned ideologue of the orgasm". [2] He made many friends among the New York Intellectuals, and had great influence on their writing. "He swayed his friends," said Saul Bellow, "with an unknown power." Bellow admired him as having "one of those ready, clear minds that see the relevant thing immediately." [4] His friends regarded him initially, according to Irving Howe, as the "golden boy" of the New York literary elite, [5] but later remembered him in their memoirs as a man who, despite his brilliance, never fulfilled his potential; as Howe put it, a "Wunderkind grown into tubby sage ... he died of lonely sloth..." [2] He died on July 14, 1956, of a heart attack in his one-room apartment in Chicago. [2]

Rosenfeld is the inspiration for the literary characters of King Dahfu in Henderson the Rain King by Bellow and of Leslie Braverman in To an Early Grave by Wallace Markfield, the latter of which was made into the movie Bye Bye Braverman by director Sidney Lumet. [5]

Bibliography

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saul Bellow</span> Canadian-American writer (1915–2005)

Saul Bellow was a Canadian–American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.

Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, the École normale supérieure, and the University of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irving Howe</span> American writer, literary and social critic and socialist activist

Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Delmore Schwartz</span> American poet (1913–1966)

Delmore Schwartz was an American poet and short story writer.

Max Shachtman was an American Marxist theorist. He went from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL–CIO President George Meany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lionel Trilling</span> American literary critic and writer

Lionel Mordecai Trilling was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. With his wife Diana Trilling, whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review.

<i>Partisan Review</i> American magazine (1934–2003)

Partisan Review (PR) was a left-wing small-circulation quarterly "little magazine" dealing with literature, politics, and cultural commentary published in New York City. The magazine was launched in 1934 by the Communist Party USA–affiliated John Reed Club of New York and was initially part of the Communist political orbit. Growing disaffection on the part of PR's primary editors began to make itself felt, and the magazine abruptly suspended publication in the fall of 1936. When the magazine reemerged late in 1937, it came with additional editors and new writers who advanced a political line deeply critical of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union.

<i>Herzog</i> (novel) 1964 novel by Saul Bellow

Herzog is a 1964 novel by Saul Bellow, composed in part of letters from the protagonist Moses E. Herzog. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and the Prix International. In 2005, Time magazine named it one of the 100 best novels in the English language since Time's founding in 1923.

Richard Palmer Blackmur was an American literary critic and poet.

<i>Ravelstein</i> 2000 novel by Saul Bellow

Ravelstein is Saul Bellow's final novel. Published in 2000, when Bellow was eighty-five years old, it received widespread critical acclaim. It tells the tale of a friendship between a university professor and a writer, and the complications that animate their erotic and intellectual attachments in the face of impending death. The novel is a roman à clef written in the form of a memoir. The narrator is in Paris with Abe Ravelstein, a renowned professor, and Nikki, his lover. Ravelstein, who is dying, asks the narrator to write a memoir about him after he dies. After his death, the narrator and his wife go on holiday to the Caribbean. The narrator catches a tropical disease and flies back to the United States to convalesce. Eventually, on recuperation, he decides to write the memoir.

<i>Humboldts Gift</i> 1975 novel by Saul Bellow

Humboldt's Gift is a 1975 novel by Canadian-American author Saul Bellow. It won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and contributed to Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year.

William Christopher Barrett was a professor of philosophy at New York University from 1950 to 1979, and later at Pace University.

Pascal Avram "Pat" Covici was a Romanian Jewish-American book publisher and editor, best known for his close associations with authors such as John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, and many more noted American literary figures, mainly through his position at Viking Press.

<i>Dangling Man</i> Novel by Saul Bellow

Dangling Man is a 1944 novel by Saul Bellow. It is his first published work.

The New York Intellectuals were a group of American writers and literary critics based in New York City in the mid-20th century. They advocated left-wing politics but were also firmly anti-Stalinist. The group is known for having sought to integrate literary theory with Marxism and socialism while rejecting Soviet socialism as a workable or acceptable political model.

Edward Albert Shils was a Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and in Sociology at the University of Chicago and an influential sociologist. He was known for his research on the role of intellectuals and their relations to power and public policy. His work was honored in 1983 when he was awarded the Balzan Prize. In 1979, he was selected by the National Council on the Humanities to give the Jefferson Lecture, the highest award given by the U.S. federal government for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

<i>Mr. Sammlers Planet</i> 1970 novel by Saul Bellow

Mr. Sammler's Planet is a 1970 novel by the American author Saul Bellow. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1971.

<i>Bye Bye Braverman</i> 1968 American black comedy film by Sidney Lumet

Bye Bye Braverman is a 1968 American comedy film directed by Sidney Lumet. The screenplay by Herbert Sargent was adapted from the 1964 novel To an Early Grave by Wallace Markfield.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven J. Zipperstein</span>

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. Zipperstein earned his B.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Werner Joseph Dannhauser was an American political philosophy professor and magazine editor. A German-Jewish émigré, he became an expert on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and on Judaism and politics and was a longtime professor of government at Cornell University. A protégé of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, Dannhauser had earlier been a writer and editor at Commentary magazine during the 1960s.

References

  1. 1 2 "First Loves of Isaac Rosenfeld, by Steven Zipperstein". This article also has details about Rosenfeld's upbringing, parents, siblings, wife and children.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Haaretz , 17 May 2009, Biography forgotten genius / The hunger artist
  3. ↑ "Stanford Report 2009 article on Rosenfeld".
  4. ↑ Isaac Rosenfeld; Mark Shechner (1988). Bellow preface to a book on Rosenfeld. Wayne State University Press. ISBN   978-0-8143-1880-5.
  5. 1 2 Zipperstein, Steven J. (2002). "Isaac Rosenfeld's Dybbuk and Rethinking Literary Biography". Partisan Review. 49 (1). Archived from the original on December 3, 2013. Retrieved June 4, 2009.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.