He was sometimes billed as Harry Rhodes, and appeared in 66 films and television programs, such as ABC's 1963 TV medical drama series about psychiatry Breaking Point.

In a 1968 TV Guide interview, Rhodes described growing up in a rough section of his native Cincinnati: "We lived between the railroad tracks and the river bank.

When he was 15, Rhodes spent two months learning to copy his mother's signature, and forged it on enlistment papers to join the U.S. Marine Corps.

His early film roles included appearances in The Nun and the Sergeant (1962), Drums of Africa (1963), Shock Corridor (1963), The Satan Bug (1965), and Mirage (1965).

In 1966, he played a supporting role as Captain Davis in the successful suspense-comedy motion picture Blindfold, starring Rock Hudson and Claudia Cardinale.

Rhodes' first television role was in a 1957 episode of Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater that starred Sammy Davis Jr.

A Chosen Few was described as "an explosive personal portrait of what (Rhodes) saw and lived through in the heart of the American South in the last all-Negro Marine boot camp."

The novel's uneducated hero remarks, "Bitterness ... is a consuming, cancerous quality out of which comes nothing but self-destruction, while out of an anger can come many constructive things, if nothing more than the drive to get something done."

Rhodes later penned two unpublished novels: Harambee, about a man with a plan to liquidate the world's entire Caucasian population, and Land of Odds, about Hollywood.