An extraordinary, gifted, vital man, Isaac Rosenfeld has been warmly remembered and vividly characterized in the memoirs of his friends, including Saul Bellow and Alfred Kazin. The memory of the man is, unfortunately, stronger than the impact of his work. Rosenfeld's literary legacy is small: one novel published in his lifetime, one collection of short stories, and one volume of reviews and essays, the latter two posthumously by friends and admirers. Although his fiction is uneven in quality, several stories, including one of his earliest ("The Hand That Fed Me") and his latest ("King Solomon"), are of lasting quality. And despite the limitation of scope and length of many of his reviews, Rosenfeld's nonfiction is noteworthy for his humanist stance vis à vis literature, the brilliance of his analysis, and the compactness and directness of his style.

Isaac Rosenfeld was the only child of a lower-middle-class Jewish family...