Robert Rosen
Author
New York
English
Robert Rosen is the author of the international bestseller Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, the memoir Bobby in Naziland: A Tale of Flatbush, and the investigative memoir Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography. His work has appeared in such publications as Mother Jones, The Soho Weekly News, The Independent, Uncut, and Proceso. Currently, he’s working on a book about the underground press in the 1970s and the moment when the student left gave way to punk.
Brooklyn in the Aftermath of World War II
In his book Bobby in Naziland, Robert Rosen intimately explores growing up in a place where Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans lived side by side and an epidemic of what was not yet called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder raged--his own father was haunted by memories of the concentration camp he'd helped liberate. Drawing on this detailed examination of Brooklyn's Flatbush neighborhood, a provincial, working-class district in the shadow of Manhattan, Rosen provides a poignant and darkly comic child's eye view of the mid-20th-century American experience.
The Final Days of John Lennon
In May 1981, five months after John Lennon was murdered by a deranged fan, Robert Rosen was given the ex-Beatle's personal diaries from the last years of his life and was asked to use them as the basis of a biography. The result was Nowhere Man, an intimate journey through Lennon's daily existence that carries us from his self-imposed seclusion in the Dakota to his re-entry into the spotlight with the making of his final album, Double Fantasy. Drawing on his knowledge of Lennon, Rosen examines the corrosive psychological effects of unprecedented superstardom and virtually unlimited wealth on a sensitive, creative, yet deeply troubled man.
The Biggest Crooks Cry "Ban Pornography!" the Loudest
Beaver Street takes on late-20th-century American history, politics, and economics, as seen through a pornographic lens. Robert Rosen explains how the underground phenomenon of "adult entertainment" became a ubiquitous cyber-force, penetrating the mainstream media and supplanting rock ’n’ roll as America’s #1 cultural export -- and why the most corrupt politicians, like Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Edwin Meese, declared war on pornography in misguided efforts to salvage their careers.