Leo Rosten papers

Finding Aid

Prepared by Kyler Andrew Culver, September 29, 2003; Last Updated: May 2020

Inclusive Dates: [1961]
Extent: .33 cubic foot (1 document case)
Physical Location: 11th floor

Biographical Note: 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.

Scope and Content: 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.

Box 1
Folder -- Contents

1. [1961]. Rosten, Leo. Captain Newman, M.D. [Original manuscript, author's working draft], pp. 1-152a
2. [1961]. Rosten, Leo. Captain Newman, M.D. [Original manuscript, author's working draft], pp. 153-276
3. [1961]. Rosten, Leo. Captain Newman, M.D. [Original manuscript, author's working draft], pp. 277-416