Isaac Rosenfeld (March 10, 1918 - July 14, 1956[1][2]) was an American writer who became a prominent member of New York intellectual circles.
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,"[2] and many articles for The Nation, Partisan Review, and The New Republic.
[2] By the late 1940s, he was immersed in the philosophy of Wilhelm Reich, "the errant Freud disciple turned ideologue of the orgasm".
"[4] His friends regarded him initially, according to Irving Howe, as the "golden boy" of the New York literary elite,[5] but later remembered him in their memoirs as a man who, despite his brilliance, never fulfilled his potential; as Howe put it, a "Wunderkind grown into tubby sage ... he died of lonely sloth..."[2] He died on July 14, 1956, of a heart attack in his one-room apartment in Chicago.
[2] 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.