Rolf Margenau

Rolf Margenau has written six novels and published two photography books.

The novels feature a main character named Wylie Cypher, first seen as a twenty-year-old college dropout who comes of age during the Korean War. At forty, Wylie is a successful but burned out lawyer with a failing marriage. He tries to find lost youth on a trek with his daughter through the high Andes. Instead, he finds mayhem, murder, a devastating civil war in Peru, and loses a toe.

Retired, in his mid-sixties, Wylie does battle with BIG AG as a Master Gardener. He befriends a group of eco-terrorists who help save the Monarch butterfly. Then in a novel called National Parks, an aged Wylie lives in a dystopian future where Congress attempts to sell off our national parks to bail out a bankrupt country.

Longevity, a fable about the results of a medical team’s effort to prolong human life by 30 years,was published early in 2019. In it Lucy Mendoza leads a team of scientists at the Prendergast Foundation who are testing an enzyme that might extend our lives by thirty years. The federal government, a major pharmaceutical company, and a billionaire investor have no qualms about eliminating Lucy to ensure that project will fail. Her former lover Grant Duran, an ex-Marine special ops officer who’s lost a hand and is now a molecular biologist, thwarts the first attempt on her life.

The novels featuring a younger Wylie are realistic with a dose of humor. The books about older Wylie are solidly satirical. Critics find them very funny, but meaningful and thought provoking.

The author retired Wylie Cypher in 2019 to research and write about how young people with a German background respond to the demands of World War II, on the home front, at war and in an American POW camp. War Story was published in September 2021.

Rolf Margenau lives amid farmland in northern New Jersey with his first wife of over sixty years.