Edwin Rolfe

Edwin Rolfe (September 7, 1909 – May 24, 1954)[1] was an American poet and journalist. His first collected poetry appeared in an anthology of four poets called We Gather Strength (1933). Three more collections followed, none of which were conventionally published. To My Contemporaries (1936) was published by the small Dynamo Press and included works by Archibald MacLeish. First Love and Other Poems (1951) was sold to subscribers. Permit Me Refuge (1955) was posthumous and published by the California Quarterly, whose editor Philip Stevenson took up a collection from Rolfe's friends, such as Albert Maltz, to pay for it.[2] Thomas McGrath wrote its foreword. Rolfe's poetry was inseparable from historical events: it responded to the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the era of McCarthyism.[3] As a poet and journalist, he contributed extensively to The Daily Worker between 1927 and 1939.

He was born Solomon Fishman in Philadelphia in 1909, the first of three sons.[4] His parents were immigrants from Russia, and had married the year before, having met through a marriage broker. Both of his parents were politically active, with his mother involved in the suffrage and birth control movements, and his father a labor organizer and union officer. In 1915 the family moved to New York. Rolfe attended New Utrecht High School and contributed to the school magazine, The Comet and eventually became its editor, following Leo Hurwitz, who was a close friend of Rolfe in his early years. During this period Rolfe (then Fishman) began to use pseudonyms, and eventually settled on "Edwin Rolfe".

Rolfe served in the Spanish Civil War with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.