Prize-winning author 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, is now available. 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 hilarious, but meaningful and thought provoking.

The author has retired Wylie Cypher and just completed a novel about how four young people with a German background respond to the demands of World War II, on the home front, at war and in a POW camp. 

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