Edwin Rolfe

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Edwin Rolfe, actually Solomon Fishman (* 1909 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † May 24, 1954 in Los Angeles , California ) was a communist American writer .

Life

Rolfe was the son of Russian immigrants; his father was a shoemaker. In 1925, at the age of 15, he joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and was active in their youth organization "Young Communist League". In 1927 he published his first poem in the Daily Worker , the party's own newspaper, for which he also wrote book reviews, drew cartoons and wrote reports, for example about the trial of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti .

In 1928 Rolfe was expelled from the CPUSA as a supporter of the Lovestone faction . Rolfe went to the University of Wisconsin Experimental College at Madison . During his sophomore year in Madison, however, he returned to New York and the party, and soon worked full-time for the Daily Worker.

In 1936 he married Mary Wolfe, in the same year his first volume of poetry was published. In 1937, Rolfe joined the Lincoln Battalion to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In Madrid , as Commissioner General of the USA, he represented the interests of his country, worked for Radio Madrid and published the English-language newspaper of the volunteers, "Volunteer for Liberty". Upon his return, Rolfe wrote a history of the Lincoln Battalion (1939), wrote the detective novel The Glass Room (1946) with Lester Fuller, and published another volume of poetry in 1951 which included his poems about the Civil War such as Elegia (written in 1948).

Rolfe's last years were marked by the struggle against McCarthyism . Hollywood's anti-communist policies that went hand in hand with the latter meant that a planned film adaptation of The Glass Room with a script written by Rolfe was not realized. In 1954 he died of a heart attack.

Works (selection)

  • Herman Spector, Joseph Kalar, Edwin Rolfe, S. Funaroff (Eds.): We Gather Strength . Liberal Press, New York 1933
  • To My Contemporaries. Poems . Dynamo Books, New York 1936
  • The Lincoln Battalion. The Story of the Americans Who Fought in Spain in the International Brigades . EA: New York 1939, WA: Haskell House Publications, New York 1974
  • Edwin Rolfe, Lester Fuller: Murder in The Glass Room . Rinehart & Company, New York, Toronto 1946
  • Elegia . Private print by Manuel Altolaguirre , Mexico 1949. Spanish translation by José Rubia Barcia
  • First Love and Other Poems . Larry Edmunds Bookstore, Los Angeles 1951
  • Permit Me Refuge . The California Quarterly, Los Angeles 1955
  • Cary Nelson, Jefferson Hendricks (Eds.): Collected Poems . University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Il., 1993, ISBN 0-252-02026-X
  • Trees Became Torches. Selected Poems . University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Il. 1995, ISBN 0-252-06417-8

Movies

  • Russians at War (documentary, commentary by Rolfe under the pseudonym Arnold Reid), USSR 1943, directed by Helen Van Dongen
  • The Scarf (based on Rolfe's short story The Dungeon ), USA 1951, directed by Ewald André Dupont

literature

  • Alvah Bessie: Men in Battle. A Story of Americans in Spain . Chandler & Sharp, San Francisco 1975, ISBN 0-88316-513-9
  • Cary Nelson, Jefferson Hendricks (Eds.): Edwin Rolfe: A Biographical Essay and Guide to the Rolfe Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Il., 1990, ISBN 0-252-06179-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Cary Nelson, Jefferson Hendricks (eds.): Edwin Rolfe: A Biographical Essay and Guide to the Rolfe Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . University of Illinois Press , Urbana, Il., 1990, ISBN 0-252-06179-9 , p. 6, p. 50.
personal data
SURNAME Rolfe, Edwin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet
DATE OF BIRTH 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH May 24, 1954
Place of death Los Angeles , California