Paul Rosenfeld

Who was Paul Rosenfeld?

Paul Leopold Rosenfeld was an American journalist, best known as a music critic.

He was born in New York City into a German-Jewish family. He studied at Riverview Military Academy, Poughkeepsie, and Yale University, graduating in 1912.

After further education at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he became a prolific journalist, writing on literature and art as well as music. He was one of the Alfred Stieglitz circle, and favoured an intellectually heavyweight and quite European approach. His friend Edmund Wilson, writing two years after Rosenfeld's death, expressed the thought that his articles had become too uncompromising for the public taste, as time went by. Indeed, these days Rosenfeld is probably more famous for having inspired Wilson's tribute — republished in Classics and Commercials — than for anything he himself produced.

Magazines which published Rosenfeld's writing included The New Republic, Seven Arts, Vanity Fair magazine, The Nation, The Dial and Modern Music. He edited Seven Arts from 1916 to 1918, and was an editor of the American Caravan yearbooks.

The Boy in the Sun was an autobiographical novel.