Lionel Rolfe’s books define the mecca that is Los Angeles culture. He is the author of the unforgettable reflections FAT MAN ON THE LEFT: Four Decades in the Underground, IN SEARCH OF LITERARY L.A. and LITERARY L.A. And he co-authored BREAD AND HYACINTHS: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles. Various writings were anthologized in Unknown California, Classic and Contemporary Writing on California Culture, Society, And Politics (Macmillan 1985), and On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled (Transaction/Rutgers 1990).

Rolfe has been working full time as a journalist since the age of 20. He spent the late '60s wandering the Golden State as a newspaperman for small dailies and weeklies. Since then, his writing has appeared frequently in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, and the Los Angeles Reader. For ten years he was the editor of the B'nai Brith Messenger, the second oldest newspaper in Los Angeles. He’s also worked as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Free Press, a police beat reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and an editor at Psychology Today.

His life and exploits have been profiled in the Los Angeles Times Magazine and other periodicals across the country. And many of his writings are collected in the American Literature special collection at the University of Southern California’s Doheny Library:

Lionel Menuhin Rolfe Collection

Going Underground