Samuel Rosenberg, Literary Psychosleuth

Buckminster Fuller wrote of the deceased,

There are probably many Sam Rosenbergs. 
I have heard of several. But there is only one 
"Sam" who physically fits his descriptive
last name: "rosen berg-pink mountain," 300
pounds all around and six feet three inches high.

Fuller went on in this vein to describe Rosenberg as "history's most massive reader."

Rosenberg's career was mainly in photography, but he also wrote magazine articles and served as a Hollywood story consultant. His doodles were once given a celebrated show in a Washington gallery.

Rosenberg, who was 85 and lived in Queens, died Jan. 5 of Parkinson's syndrome. He is best known for his psychologically acute and hilarious 1974 study of Sherlock Holmes, Naked is the Best Disguise. Through a compulsive dissection of each reference within Conan Doyle's oevre, Rosenberg showed that darker meanings lurked within the shadows of the sleuth's triumphant adventures.

In each tale, he wrote, "A personified fraction of Doyle's multiplex personality emerges from his psychic inner room to commit a forbidden, sexual, antisocial act. But in every story, that other psychic component named Sherlock Holmes arrives to prevent its consummation and to punish his sibling malefactor." As evidence Rosenberg points to references to such dubious individuals as Oscar Wilde, Dionysius, Catullus, Napoleon, Flaubert, Edgar Allen Poe, George Sand and Henry Ward Beecher. Moving from darkness into light, Rosenberg concluded his study with the discovery of a kind of religious illumination lying hidden within the text as well.

In an earlier book, The Come As You Are Masquerade Party, a collection of articles, he described himself as a "Trivialist" who once abandoned his blind father by the Liberty Bell to sneak off and view George Washington's wooden teeth. A list of objects in his collection includes: defunct stock certificates, rewards for merit for schoolchildren, tin toys, Sicilian wagon carvings, money from banks that failed during the Panic of 1837, a ticket to the impeachment hearing of President Johnson, a braille valentine, a receipt for hay from 1786, stationary from the Lusitania, and a petrified apple.

Other topics that yielded to his essayist's wit included Melville, Schweitzer, the precise chronology that led up to the composition of Frankenstein, and a rather feminist reading of the story of Lot's wife.

Rosenberg was known for remembering everything he read. He was born in Cleveland, where his father was (presumably before going blind) a butcher and a songwriter. Coming to New York in the 1930s, he became known for his terse and witty critiques as a play-reader. From there he quickly gained access to dramatic and artistic circles, and was a sought-after dinner companion and bon vivant. In the 1960s he worked for MGM fighting plaigerism suits by finding literary sources that were common to both an official script and the challenger.

During WWII he worked for the O.S.S., and moved to Washington with his wife Angela Nizzardini, a Martha Graham dancer. She was described by Fuller as "gazelle-like." After the war Rosenberg, still on O.S.S. assignment, took pictures of liberated Nazi death camps and was official photographer at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco.