Bernard Wolfe (August 28, 1915, New Haven, Connecticut – October 27, 1985, Calabasas, California) was an American writer.
Wolfe entered Yale University at 16 and graduated in 1935 with a degree in psychology. He then enrolled for a few months’ additional study at Yale’s Graduate Division of General Studies. In 1936 he taught at Bryn Mawr’s summer College of Women Trade Unionists. He moved to New York and between 1936 and 1938 contributed to Trotskyist journals, such as The Militant and The New International.
In New York City the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky was looking for an English-speaking secretary to assist Trotsky in Mexico. Wolfe’s friend Arthur Mizener, a professor at Yale, provided funds, and in 1937 Wolfe travelled to Mexico, where he worked for eight months as Trotsky’s bodyguard and secretary, acting as the liaison between Trotsky and the John Dewey Commission investigation into the Moscow Trials.
Between 1937 and 1939 Wolfe occasionally worked in the Merchant Marines. In 1939 he moved to Greenwich Village, where he eventually drifted away from the Trotskyite movement and met Anais Nin and Henry Miller. Through them he found employment writing pornographic novels (11 in 11 months) for the private collection of Roy Melisander Johnson, an Oklahoma oil millionaire. He credited his pornographic output with teaching him to write to specified lengths while facing deadlines: “I acquired the work discipline of a professional writer, capable of a solid daily output.” In 1941 he was the assistant night editor for Paramount Newsreel for a few weeks. In 1943 and 1944 he wrote war-related science articles for Popular Science Monthly and Mechanix Illustrated. He eventually became the editor of the latter magazine.
In 1946 he collaborated with the jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow in writing Mezzrow's autobiography, Really the Blues. The book was a popular success, introducing the mass audience to aspects of black culture. It received a flattering notice in Billy Rose’s syndicated column in October of that year and in 1947 Wolfe was hired as ghost writer for Billy Rose’s syndicated column. Wolfe worked on a further study of "negro" culture in America, which was never published, but excerpts were published in American magazines in 1949 and 1950, translated for Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps modernes and quoted by Frantz Fanon .