Norman Rosten was a poet, playwright, and novelist. In a diverse career, Mr. Rosten published seven volumes of poetry and four novels. His most popular play was MISTER JOHNSON, an adaptation of the Joyce Cary novel. Often his work was intertwined with his life as a longtime resident of Brooklyn. His 1968 novel "Under the Boardwalk" was about a Coney Island boy approaching adolescence. Writing in "The New York Times Book Review," Ronald Sukenick said the novel "finds its real ancestry in the stories of Sherwood Anderson, to which it is a gentle, humane, funny, and beautifully written successor." In 1979, Borough President Howard Golden named Mr. Rosten poet laureate of Brooklyn, and he retained that title until his death. One of his best-known books was a 1973 work of nonfiction, "Marilyn: An Untold Story," an intimate look at Marilyn Monroe, whom he had come to know through his friendship with her third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller. Mr. Rosten and his wife, Hedda, were close friends of the actress in the last seven years of her life. Many years later, he wrote the libretto for MARILYN, Ezra Laderman's opera about the actress, presented by the New York City Opera in 1993. Mr. Rosten also wrote the screenplay for Sidney Lumet's 1962 film of Mr. Miller's play "A View from the Bridge.” Rosten graduated from Brooklyn College and New York University. From there, he went to the University of Michigan, where he and Mr. Miller were in the same playwriting class. Each won the Avery Hopwood Award, Mr. Rosten for his drama and his poetry. Returning to New York in 1939, Mr. Rosten wrote poetry and also radio plays, some of them about American literary figures. In 1940 he was named a winner in the Yale Series of Younger Poets for "Return Again, Traveler," his first book of verse. In the title poem, he wrote: "You were ready enough for that wink of light/that image where the blindness spoke." The book led to a Guggenheim Fellowship. Later, he published poetry in "The New Yorker" and other magazines.
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