Edwin Rolfe — Brickyards at Beacon and Other Poems
Edwin Rolfe’s life passed through the defining conflicts of his century: immigrant labor politics, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Hollywood, and the blacklist. Born Solomon Fishman, he became a poet and journalist on the American left, edited Volunteer for Liberty in Madrid, served with the Lincoln Battalion, and later wrote from Los Angeles as political repression narrowed his means of livelihood. His best poems turn public history into intimate tests of courage, loyalty, anger, and betrayal. This selected edition brings together Rolfe’s complete seven-poem contribution to We Gather Strength and seven late poems collected in Permit Me Refuge; it does not claim to be his collected poems.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
Spector, Herman, Joseph Kalar, Edwin Rolfe, and S. Funaroff. We Gather Strength. New York: Liberal Press, 1933.
Rolfe, Edwin. To My Contemporaries. New York: Dynamo Books, 1936.
Rolfe, Edwin. The Lincoln Battalion: The Story of the Americans Who Fought in Spain in the International Brigades. New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1939.
Rolfe, Edwin, ed. Russians at War. New York, 1943.
Rolfe, Edwin, and Lester Fuller. The Glass Room. New York: Rinehart, 1946.
Rolfe, Edwin. First Love and Other Poems. Los Angeles: Larry Edmunds Bookshop, 1951.
Rolfe, Edwin. Permit Me Refuge. Los Angeles: California Quarterly, 1955.
Rolfe, Edwin. Collected Poems. Edited by Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Rolfe, Edwin. Trees Became Torches: Selected Poems. Edited by Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.