[1] A prolific radio, film and television writer for over 30 years, Rolfe described the craft as requiring "Stubbornness, masochism and perhaps some inherited insensitivity to pain.

[8] In 1952 Rolfe shared a two-office bungalow owned by Universal Studios in West Los Angeles with author Ray Bradbury.

Richard Widmark starred in Rolfe's Too Hot To Live, playing a drifter who finds himself accused of murdering a young cafe waitress.

[12] Co-written with Harold Jack Bloom (who was 27 years old as well), the Western film was a "five-character chamber play"[13] directed by Anthony Mann and starred James Stewart.

[15] Rolfe's screenplay was set during the Korean War, where a unit of American soldiers, along with a three-man British tank crew are trapped behind enemy lines.

[16] Rolfe's script portrayed the career and accidental death of a Korean War jet ace who was killed on August 25, 1954, while serving as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, California.

Rolfe's script, co-written with Irving Wallace, centered on the crew performing a key test run of the new 200-ton Boeing B-52 Stratofortress.

A New York Times review said "It's a pleasure to watch a modest, soldier vs. Indian picture shape into something respectable...Pillars of the Sky, with a nice, surprising mixture of compassion and cynicism, keeps insisting that (the characters) all matter, red and white...

[20] Using a script outline created by Rolfe in 1961, Rod Serling wrote A Quality of Mercy, the 80th episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

[21] Rolfe was a contract writer for CBS but left in 1962 to produce The Eleventh Hour, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer star vehicle for Wendell Corey.

[24] Rolfe had approached CBS with a show idea featuring a contemporary New York City private eye who perused out of town newspapers for leads for work.

[28] Rolfe and Meadow hired a number of new writers during the show's 6 year run, many of whom would later create outstanding television, film and books.

Among them: Gene Roddenberry, creator and writer of the original Star Trek series, wrote 23 episodes of Have Gun - Will Travel and won a Writer’s Guild award for one of them, Bruce Geller, creator of the TV series Mission: Impossible and Mannix, Sam Peckinpah who would later direct the film The Wild Bunch and Irving Wallace, author of the books The Agony and the Ecstasy and The Man also wrote for the show.

[29] Producer Norman Felton had been developing a television spy series named Solo with Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.

episode, The Giuoco Piano Affair which aired on November 10, 1964, where he appeared as "Texan" in the party-scene at Gervaise Ravel's (portrayed by Anne Francis) apartment.

[31] Rolfe created and produced Dundee and the Culhane, an American Western television drama series starring John Mills and Sean Garrison that aired on CBS from September 6 to December 13, 1967.

CBS had bought it on the strength of Rolfe's pilot, but after seeing a few additional episodes and scripts, network officials were convinced that the show would fail before it caught on.

The drama series which ran for one season related the adventures of government agent Glenn Garth Gregory who relied on his photographic memory to solve crimes.

[38] After the cancellation of Dundee and the Culhane, Rolfe returned to the spy genre, creating and producing an ABC network television series adaptation of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm.

[39] In 1974, Rolfe wrote the pilot episode script for Manhunter, a Quinn Martin Productions film directed by Walter Grauman starring Rick Dalton, Stefanie Powers, Gary Lockwood and James Olson.

Ken Howard replaced Dalton when the CBS network picked up the series, renaming it The Manhunter which ran for 22 episodes until March 5, 1975.

The Key to Rebecca, based on Ken Follett's best-selling suspense novel is credited to Rolfe's pseudonym "Sam Harris" for Taft Entertainment in association with Castle Combe Productions.

[41] Rolfe then developed other crime drama tv shows, creating, writing and producing Rosetti And Ryan,[42] Delvecchio and Kaz.

[44] In 1975 Rolfe purchased the Zimmerman House, a landmark home located in the Brentwood neighborhood in Los Angeles for $205,000 (equivalent to $1,160,779 in 2023) from actor Richard Kelton.