October 19, 1906 [Kokomo, Indiana] – November 9, 1989 [Santa Rosa, California]
Rolfe was born Solomon Fishman in Philadelphia to a family of Russian immigrants (Nathan and Bertha). His father, a shoemaker, was an active trade unionist and a member of the Socialist Party of America. His mother, a friend of Margaret Sanger, was an advocate of women’s rights. He joined the Communist Party in 1925 and published his first poem, “The Ballad of the Subway Digger” in 1927. He became a student at the Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1929 but left in his second year to move to New York to become active again in politics, befriending Langston Hughes among others. He married Mary Wolfe in 1936. His first book, To My Contemporaries (1936) appeared shortly before Rolfe moved to Spain to volunteer for the Spanish Civil War as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Rolfe worked for a year as editor of the brigade newspaper Volunteer for Liberty and, though not particularly fit to be a soldier, joined the troops in 1938. He arrived back in the U.S. in 1939; he published a history of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion later that year. He was drafted in 1943, but by that point Mary had accepted a job in Los Angeles; Rolfe joined her there after the war. Rolfe published a mystery novel, The Glass Room, and worked on the fringes of the film industry until his was blacklisted in 1947. He died of a heart attack.
