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Selden Rodman was an author, poet, editor, art collector, and cultural critic. He was born in Manhattan in 1909 to an affluent family and named Cary Selden Rodman after his father, who died less than a year after his birth. While attending Yale in the 1930s, he co-founded with William Harlan Hale the Harkness Hoot, a satirical magazine critical of the university. After a trip to Europe, where he became acquainted with Ezra Pound and Thomas Mann, he returned to New York and, with Alfred Bingham, founded the leftist magazine Common Sense. Rodman cultivated cultural writers for the magazine, while Bingham wrote on politics and economics. Rodman also wrote poetry, history, and travel books and edited anthologies. In 1938 he first visited Haiti. His play, The Revolutionists, is based on the 1803 slave revolt that founded that country. He later became a patron of Haitian, Brazilian, and Mexican painting. He was a consistent advocate of the poor and of the culture and creations of the social underclass.

Rodman was married four times and divorced three times. He married Eunice Clark in 1933, Hilda Clausen in 1938, and Polish writer Maia Wojciechowska in 1950, with whom he had a daughter. In 1962 he married Carole Cleaver, with whom he had two children. In 1972 a serious fire consumed most of Rodman’s Oakland, New Jersey, home and severely damaged his papers. He died in Ridgewood, New Jersey, in 2002.