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I've been reading a sort of obscure book that someone passed to me, since I'd told him I'd been reading Saul Bellow lately. It's called "Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing," by Steven Zipperstein. Who was Rosenfeld? He was Isaac Rosenfeld, a childhood friend of Bellow's in Chicago and one of a group of young intellectuals embracing Trotskyism and believing they would all become great writers and thinkers. Rosenfeld was the "genius" of the bunch, the one who was expected to become the American Dostoevsky. Even though he died young, however (at 38, from a heart attack), he was already skidding off the tracks ... leading a bohemian existence, womanizing, becoming involved with kookie Reichian orgone theory, etc. He'd become all but forgotten, and this book tries to examine is body of writing and his (failed) life.
I don't really recommend it unless you have an interest in writing or the weird intellectual infighting of the postwar years. But it's kind of interesting.
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