Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing

A haunting consideration of the extraordinary mind of Saul Bellow’s unjustly forgotten friend and literary rival and the extremes of the writing life

Born in Chicago in 1918, the prodigiously gifted and erudite Isaac Rosenfeld was anointed a “genius” upon the publication of his “luminescent” novel, Passage from Home and was expected to surpass even his closest friend and rival, Saul Bellow. Yet when felled by a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, Rosenfeld had published relatively litt...