Ralph Roeder

Ralph Edmund LeClercq Roeder (April 7, 1890 – October 22, 1969) was a New York-born American writer and actor whose career spanned Broadway performance, journalism, and historical scholarship. Born in New York City to George Roeder, a German immigrant, and Ida Carolina LeClercq, whose family was from Charleston, South Carolina, Roeder came from a culturally distinguished background. His maternal grandmother was the American composer Marie Regina Siegling LeClercq. He pursued his education at Harvard University and Columbia University.

Roeder appeared on Broadway between 1915 and 1931, taking on roles in productions including Hedda Gabler, Getting Married, The Wild Duck, Electra, and John. Among his stage roles was Orestes in Sophocles's Electra. Alongside his acting work, he contributed articles to The Arts and to Theater Arts Monthly, and during the 1920s served as Rome correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.

His life extended well beyond the stage. As a recent college graduate, Roeder traveled to Mexico during the Revolution that began in 1910, where he sided with Pancho Villa as a volunteer. During that period he was captured by Mexican counter-revolutionaries and faced execution by firing squad, though the order to fire was never given and he survived. On December 3, 1929, he married Fania Esiah Mindell, a theater set and costume designer, artist, and feminist born in the Russian Empire. Mindell had been a co-defendant alongside Margaret Sanger and Ethel Byrne in the Brownsville Clinic Trials of 1917.

During the 1930s, Roeder researched and wrote three books focused on Italian history. His first published work was Savanarola: A Study in Conscience, released by Brentano's in 1930. The Viking Press subsequently published The Man of the Renaissance: Four Lawgivers, Savonarola, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Aretino in 1933, followed by Catherine de Medici and the Lost Revolution in 1937. By the late 1940s his attention returned to Mexico, resulting in Juárez and His México, a Biographical History, published in two volumes by The Viking Press in 1947. The work was recognized as the first major biography of Mexican President Benito Juárez written in English. Reviews in the Hispanic American Historical Review and The Catholic Historical Review acknowledged the significance of bringing a full-length treatment of Juárez to an English-language readership, while both also noted the book's complete absence of scholarly citations.

During the 1950s, as McCarthyism intensified in the United States, Roeder and his wife relocated to Mexico City, where he continued work for the Exiled Writers Committee that he had begun in New York. He spent much of his later life there as an expatriate, writing and translating works of a primarily historical nature. In addition to English, he was fluent in Italian, German, and French, and authored works in Spanish. In 1965, the Mexican government awarded him the Orden del Águila Azteca, the country's highest literary honor. Roeder died in Mexico City on October 22, 1969, of a gunshot wound to the head in an apparent suicide, at the age of 79. He is buried at the Panteón de Dolores in Mexico City.