Volume 36, Number 11 · June 29, 1989
Golden Boy
By James Atlas
Passage From Home
by Isaac Rosenfeld, with a new foreword by Mark Shechner
Markus Wiener, 280 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader
edited and introduced by Mark Shechner, foreword by Saul Bellow
Wayne State University Press, 463 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Some writers are remembered more for their unfulfilled promise than for anything they wrote. Like Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld burned out young. Passage From Home, his first novel, was published to much critical acclaim in 1946, when he was only twenty-eight; it was also his last. Two other books followed after his death: Alpha & Omega, a collection of stories, and An Age of Enormity, a selection of essays and reviews. In 1956, thirty-eight years old, Rosenfeld died of a heart attack. His early death has contributed to the legend he's become. Saul Bellow, who grew up with Rosenfeld in Chicago, wrote: 'He swayed his friends with an unknown power. We called it 'charm,' 'wisdom,' 'genius.' In the end, with a variety of intonations, we could find nothing to call it but 'Isaac.''
Review, 6141 words
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