In a review of Harry Roskolenko’s memoir When I Was Last on Cherry Street, Allen Churchill wrote: “Harry Roskolenko jumped from the ghetto of New York’s Cherry Street to literary respectability in the time-honored pattern of the radical of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. The one step he skipped was fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and he missed this only because he was newly in love with a Greenwich Village girl. For the rest, he touched every base of the ball park. After a fight with a stern father, he ran away from home at 13, became an adolescent seaman on a tanker, read voraciously in a library unexpectedly found aboard. After trips to Europe, he returned to New York to attend night school.”
—New York Times, May 23, 1965
Portrait by Clifton Ernest Pugh