In the pantheon of American letters, the name Isaac Rosenfeld probably would not make many “favorite authors” lists.

Steven Zipperstein

It was not to be, and when he died of a heart attack in 1956 at age 38, Rosenfeld left behind only one published novel, plus many stories, essays, and literary false starts.

To many, this mercurial writer might seem like a poster child for failure. But historian Steven J. Zipperstein saw much more in the life and work of Isaac Rosenfeld.

Zipperstein’s new book “Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing” examines a man who embodies the famous couplet by poet John Greenleaf Whittier: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen/The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’ ”

“He was of interest to me,” says Zipperstein, the former director of Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, now wrapping up two years at Harvard, “because a study of him could initially say a great deal about what it’s like to live a writer’s life.”

Born in Chicago in 1918, Rosenfeld revealed a prodigious intellect early on. By his teens, he had fallen in with a group of young Jewish writers and communists — among them Bellow — who fully expected to revolutionize American literature.

Bellow went on to do just that, while Rosenfeld certainly tried. At 28, he published his only complete novel, “Passage from Home,” which drew mostly raves and seemed to open many doors.

Rosenfeld then went about closing most of them. Though he never stopped writing, Rosenfeld lived a largely dissolute life of sexual addiction (he and his wife had an open marriage) and attraction to oddball trends such as Reichian Therapy (which urged adherents to spend time in a box to harness sexual energy).

Zipperstein, who specializes in the history of Eastern European Jewry, says he was drawn to “the eerie way in which [Rosenfeld’s] life was spent in such proximity to fame, and in turn the way he became an emblem for abject failure.”

Literary figures Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe and Bellow wrote lengthy memoirs about Rosenfeld, and he was fictionalized in multiple accounts. Zipperstein drew on those, and also gained access to scores of journals, previously undiscovered letters and other archival material.

The record shows a writer willing to break from the confines of radical politics and shtetl background noise, in search of his own artistic voice.

Zipperstein says Rosenfeld “took very seriously” what it “means to be Jewish” in his writing. Though poor eyesight prevented him from serving in the military, Rosenfeld was profoundly shaken by the Holocaust. He was an early supporter of Israel, even though that ran counter to the universalism of his Marxist friends.

“One of his most pronounced traits was his willingness to share so candidly his fears, which in turn come to bedevil his own posthumous memory,” Zipperstein says. “He is turned into a quintessence of failure by some of the people closest to him. I argue that is because in no small measure they are terrified of slipping and failing.”

Though remembered as having lost his way, Rosenfeld was doing some of his best writing just before his early death, Zipperstein says. “To the degree he could encapsulate his ambitions, his was to write another ‘Crime and Punishment.’ When measured against those ambitions, of course, he failed. At the same time, he died in his 30s. When one takes a new and fresh look at what he did achieve, it’s quite remarkable.”

“Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing” by Steven J. Zipperstein (288 pages, Yale University Press, $27.50)