Rosten, Leo Calvin

▪ 1998

      Polish-born American writer (b. April 11, 1908, Lodz, Pol.—d. Feb. 19, 1997, New York, N.Y.), had a six-decade-long career during which he wrote numerous works, both fiction and nonfiction, that celebrated the culture, humour, and language of the Jewish people. He was best known for two books: The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (1937), which was based on the language struggles of an immigrant student in one of his night English classes and first appeared in The New Yorker as a series of short stories written under the name Leonard Q. Ross; and The Joys of Yiddish (1968), a lighthearted reference work of commonly used Yiddish expressions. Rosten moved to the U.S. with his family when he was three, and they settled in Chicago. He was educated at the University of Chicago (Ph.B., 1930; Ph.D., 1937) and the London School of Economics and Political Science. To help pay for his studies, Rosten taught the evening classes that inspired some of his stories, and he later taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, New York City, Yale University, and the University of California, Berkeley, among others. During World War II he worked for the U.S. government in such capacities as chief of the Motion Pictures Division of the Office of Facts and Figures and deputy director of the Office of War Information. As a consultant to the secretary of war, he was sent to France, Germany, and England on a special mission, and from 1947 to 1949 he worked for the RAND Corporation. Among Rosten's other works were Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (1941), a sociological study of the film industry; six screenplays; and sequels to the Kaplan book, The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (1959) and O K*A*P*L*A*N! My K*A*P*L*A*N! (1976).

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