Rosenfeld, Isaac, 1918-1956

Isaac Louis Rosenfeld, (b. March 10, 1918, d. July 15, 1956), was a Chicago-born writer, critic, and university professor. Rosenfeld's only published novel, Passage from Home, echoes his upbringing in a lower-middle class Jewish household on the West Side of Chicago. Following his mother's death during the 1918 flu epidemic, Rosenfeld was largely raised by his stepmother and aunts, Dora and Rae. A sickly but precocious child, Rosenfeld demonstrated a keen intellect and verbal talent from an early age.

He attended the University of Chicago in the 1930s where his brilliance and humor made him the beloved center of a close-knit circle of literary intellectuals that included Saul Bellow and Oliver Tarcov. He studied under Eliseo Vivas and Rudolph Carnap, and in 1937 won the John Billings Fisk Prize for a group of lyrical poems. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1939 and his Master of Arts degree in 1941. That same year he married fellow University of Chicago student Vasiliki Sarantakis, and moved to New York City where he entered a graduate program in philosophy at New York University.

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