Ralph Roeder

Ralph Edmund LeClercq Roeder (April 7, 1890 - October 22, 1969) was an American author.

Ralph Edmund LeClercq Roeder

Biography

Ralph Edmund LeClercq Roeder was born in New York, a son of German immigrant George Roeder and Ida Carolina LeClercq of Charleston, South Carolina. His maternal grandmother was the American composer Marie Regina Siegling LeClercq.[1][2] He was educated at Harvard and at Columbia University. In the 1920s he was Rome correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. He contributed articles to The Arts and to Theater Arts Monthly and had a brief career as an actor on Broadway, playing among other roles, Orestes in Sophocles’s “Electra”.[3][4] On December 3, 1929 he married Russian born Fania Esiah Mindell of New York, a theater set and costume designer, artist, and feminist who, together with Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne, had been a co-defendant in the Brownsville Clinic Trials of 1917.[5][6][7]

Roeder spent much of his later life as an expatriate in Mexico City where he wrote and translated works of a mostly historical nature. He spoke German and French fluently, and authored books in Spanish.[8] His biography of Benito Juárez won acclaim in the United States, and in 1965, earned him Mexico's highest literary award, the Orden del Águila Azteca.[3] He died in Mexico City in 1969 of a gunshot wound to the head in an apparent suicide, and is buried at the city's Panteón de Dolores.[9][10]

References

  1. Siegling, Marie Regina. (1908). Memoirs of a Dowager. (Siegling Family Papers.)
  2. Archivegrid, Memoirs of a Dowager : 1908 Dec. 20 / Mary Regina Siegling LeClercq
  3. 3.0 3.1 "Ralph Roeder" New York Times Obituary: 21 Feb 1970.
  4. http://ibdb.com/production.php?id=10509
  5. New York, New York, Marriage Indexes 1866-1937
  6. New York Times: 9 Jan 1917.
  7. The Washington Post: 7 Feb 1917.
  8. García, Ariadna (31 March 2002). "Noticia de un exilio". El Universal (in Spanish) (México).
  9. Ralph Edmund LeClercq Roeder, American Writer at Find a Grave
  10. Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835-1974

Books

Sources

External links