Rosten came to the U.S. at the age of three as the son of Polish immigrants.
Publishing between 1937 and 1980, he wrote mostly humorous novels and short
stories focussing on the plays on words that result from the melting pot of
the New World. Rosten was respected as a social scientist for his University
of Chicago Ph.D. work on Washington correspondents, as well as for a 1941 statistical
analysis of the Hollywood production industry. During his early years he wrote
under the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross.
This collection contains the heavily revised working typescript for Rosten's
critically acclaimed book, Captain Newman, M.D. described as "...the
story of a creative and compassionate psychiatrist loyal to and tenaciously
supportive of the war bedeviled inmates of his Air Force mental ward. The book
vaguely resembles Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (published the same year) as it casts
a sympathetic eye upon the irony of sending healthy men into combat, resurrecting
their traumatized egos, and returning them to combat to be killed or wounded."*
*"Leo Rosten" in Dictionary
of Literary Biography, Vol 11: American Humorists, 1800-1950. edited by
Stanley Trachtenberg. The Gale Group, 1982, pp. 410-418.