Ralph Leclercq Roeder

Background

Ralph Edmund LeClercq Roeder was born in New York, a son of German immigrant George Roeder and Ida Carolina LeClercq of Charleston, South Carolina.

Education

Student Columbia, 1906. Bachelor of Arts, Harvard, 1911.

Career

In the 1920s he was Rome correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. He contributed articles to The Arts and to Theater Arts Monthly and had a brief career as an actor on Broadway, playing among other roles, Orestes in Sophocles’s “Electra”. Well before meeting Fania, Roeder had shown interest in leftist causes.

As a freshly minted college graduate Roeder had traveled to Mexico during the revolution which began in 1910.

He had sided with Pancho Villa as a volunteer, and at one point was captured "by Mexican counter-revolutionaries and was stood against a wall to be shot. Foreign some reason the order to fire was not given and he survived." During the 1930"s Roeder researched and wrote three books on Italian history, but by the late 1940"s he again turned his interest to Mexico.

During the 1950"s with McCarthyism on the rise at home, the Roeders moved to Mexico City. Here "Ralph continued work he had begun in New York for the Exiled Writers Committee"

Roeder spent much of his later life in Mexico City as an expatriate where he wrote and translated works of a mostly historical nature.

In addition to Italian, he spoke German and French fluently, and authored books in Spanish.

He died in Mexico City in 1969 of a gunshot wound to the head in an apparent suicide, and is buried at the city"s Panteón de Dolores.

Achievements

• Ralph Leclercq Roeder has been listed as a notable writer by Marquis Who's Who.

Membership

Member.

Connections

Married Fania Mindell, December 3, 1929.

Father:

George Roeder

Mother:

Ida (Leclercq) Roeder

Spouse:

Fania Mindell