Career
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," 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. He grew up a few blocks from Saul Bellow, and had known him since he was a teenager, when they worked on the same high school newspaper.
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.
By the late 1940s, he was immersed in the philosophy of Wilhelm Reich, "the errant Freud disciple turned ideologue of the orgasm". he died of lonely sloth.." He died on July 14, 1956 of a heart attack in his one-room apartment in Chicago. 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.
