Samuel Harris Rolfe (born Samuel Harris Rosenbaum, February 18, 1924 – July 10, 1993) was an American screenwriter best known for creating (with Herb Meadow) the 1950–60s highly rated CBS television series Have Gun – Will Travel, as well as his work on the 1960s NBC television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Eleventh Hour.
A prolific radio, film and television writer for over 30 years, Rolfe described the craft as requiring "Stubbornness, masochism and perhaps some inherited insensitivity to pain. Writing is the most exasperating, most tormenting, loneliest occupation in the world".
Rolfe was born Samuel Harris Rosenbaum on February 18, 1924, in New York City.
He was the first of Max and Sylvia (née Kshonsky) Rosenbaum's two children. Both of Rolfe's parents were Russian immigrants. His father worked at a bookbinding company, while his mother worked as a seamstress.
Rolfe served in the US Army during World War II. After being discharged in 1945 he studied engineering, then advertising under the GI Bill. He worked as a railroad labourer and a dance instructor.
In a 2005 New York Times article, Rolfe's wife Hilda Newman-Rolfe related how Rolfe started his career: "I met my husband, Sam Rolfe, in 1952. He was a struggling writer, but right after we met he sold a screenplay called The Naked Spur for $25,000 (equivalent to $303,102 in 2025). That was his big break... After we were married, he began to write and produce television shows. He created 13 in all, including Have Gun - Will Travel, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Manhunter".
In 1952 Rolfe shared a two-office bungalow owned by Universal Studios in West Los Angeles with author Ray Bradbury. Rolfe was writing The Naked Spur while Bradbury was working on It Came From Outer Space.
Rolfe's early career included writing 30 minute radio plays for various broadcast anthology shows. Among them were:
In 1950 Rolfe was writing for the radio anthology show Suspense. Richard Widmark starred in Rolfe's Too Hot To Live, playing a drifter who finds himself accused of murdering a young cafe waitress. Rolfe's script was later adapted as a television show.
In 1951 Rolfe's script Time To Kill was broadcast on Hollywood Star Playhouse. The drama starred Wendell Corey as a would-be bus rider who discovers townspeople have violent plans for him as he waits four hours for the next bus.
In 1953 Rolfe was 27 years old when he wrote his first screenplay The Naked Spur. The film earned him a 1954 Oscar nomination. Co-written with Harold Jack Bloom (who was 27 years old as well), the Western film was a "five-character chamber play" directed by Anthony Mann and starred James Stewart.
In his 1971 essay The Evolution of the Western, film critic André Bazin named the film The Naked Spur "the finest of all Westerns". In 1997, the film was inducted into the National Film Registry as a Western film "with tense psychological complexity through strong, clear story-telling by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom".
Rolfe's screenplay was set during the Korean War, where a unit of American soldiers, along with a three-man British tank crew are trapped behind enemy lines.
Rolfe's script portrayed the career and accidental death of a Korean War jet ace who was killed on August 25, 1954, while serving as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, California.
Rolfe's script, co-written with Irving Wallace, centered on the crew performing a key test run of the new 200-ton Boeing B-52 Stratofortress.
In 1956 Rolfe wrote the script for Universal Pictures' Western, Pillars of the Sky from a novel by Will Henry. Rolfe's script was sympathetic to Native Americans, who were often portrayed as one-dimensional villains. A New York Times review said "It's a pleasure to watch a modest, soldier vs. Indian picture shape into something respectable...Pillars of the Sky, with a nice, surprising mixture of compassion and cynicism, keeps insisting that (the characters) all matter, red and white... Thanks to scenarist Sam Rolfe (or author Will Henry), the actors sound like real people".
Most of Rolfe's career was spent in television. Rolfe flourished as a freelance writer, producer and showrunner over a career that lasted four decades.
In 1963 David Susskind and Dan Melnick hired Rolfe as a vice-president at their Talent Associates-Paramount, Ltd. production company. Three weeks later, Rolfe quit saying he felt better working alone and that he should resign "before I involved myself too deeply".