Selden Rodman

American playwright, poet, and art critic Selden Rodman published over 40 books in his lifetime. Born in New York City in 1909, Rodman attended Loomis Academy and Yale University before publishing his first book of poetry, Mortal Triumphs and Other Poems (1932). He wrote articles for the radical magazine Common Sense and edited articles by W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Theodore Dreiser, and Edmund Wilson. In 1942 Rodman served in the Office of Strategic Services, a spy agency, during World War II.

Rodman’s other books include Lawrence: The Last Crusade (1937), about T.E. Lawrence; The Airmen (1941); the verse-play The Revolutionists (1941), which was commissioned by the Haitian government and produced in Port-au-Prince; and The Amazing Year: A Diary in Verse (1947). He also edited many anthologies during his career, including War and the Poet (1945) and the New Anthology of Modern Poetry (1938), which notably included non-verse items such as folk songs, musical choruses, and political speeches. He wrote the first monograph on the African American artist Horace Pippin and also wrote frequently about Haiti and Haitian art. And as an extremely well-connected literary man of letters, Rodman once beat Ezra Pound in tennis and met scores of important writers of his time. He published a collection of conversations with literary figures including Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, and Leon Trotsky. Rodman died in 2002.