Albert Maltz

At the Theater Union he met Margaret Larkin (1899–1967), whom he married in 1937.

Albert Maltz (October 28, 1908 – April 26, 1985) was an American playwright, fiction writer and screenwriter.

Writing in the Journal of American Studies, Colin Burnett argues, "The immediate attacks on Maltz by critics like Mike Gold were motivated primarily by the view that a properly Marxist aesthetics must follow the Leninist–Zhdanovite theory of 'art as a weapon'," though Burnett proposes "a reexamination of the 'para-Marxist' theory of art [Maltz] developed to clarify the role of leftist criticism and the 'citizen writer' ... in light of debates about art and literature in the journal New Masses (1926–48), as well as in international Marxist aesthetics."

Born into an affluent Jewish family, in Brooklyn, New York, Maltz was educated at Columbia University, where he was a member of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity and the class of 1930, and the Yale School of Drama.

During the 1930s, Maltz worked as a playwright for the Theater Union, which was "an organization of theater artists and [pro-Communist] political activists who mounted professional productions of plays oriented towards working people and their middle-class allies."

In 1932, his play Merry Go Round was adapted for a film.

He became a communist in 1935 out of conviction, later telling an interviewer: "I also read the Marxist classics. I still think it to be the noblest set of ideals ever penned by man ... Where else in political literature do you find thinkers saying that we were going to end all forms of human exploitation? Wage exploitation, exploitation of women by men, the exploitation of people of colour by white peoples, the exploitation of colonial countries by imperialist countries. And Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom, where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read."

He won the O. Henry Award twice: in 1938 for The Happiest Man on Earth, a short story published in Harper's Magazine, and in 1941 for Afternoon in the Jungle, published in The New Yorker.

His collection of short fiction The Way Things Are, and Other Stories was published in 1938, as was his novella Seasons of Celebration, included in The Flying Yorkshireman and Other Novellas, a multi-author compilation released as a May 1938 Book of the Month Club selection.

During this time, Maltz's play Private Hicks appeared in William Kozlenko's 1939 curated collection The Best Short Plays of the Social Theater, along with such plays as Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty, The Cradle Will Rock by Marc Blitzstein, and The Dog Beneath the Skin by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.

These writings and his 1940 novel The Underground Stream are considered works of proletarian literature.

After working uncredited on Casablanca, Maltz's first screenwriting credit was for This Gun for Hire (1942), co-written with W. R. Burnett.

During this period, he also received two Academy Awards for documentary or documentary-style films: the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1942 for The Defeat of German Armies Near Moscow and a special Oscar in 1945 for The House I Live In, an 11-minute film with singer-actor Frank Sinatra opposing anti-Semitism through an incident of young bullies chasing a Jewish boy, prompting Sinatra to speak and sing about why such behavior is wrong.

In 1944 he published the novel The Cross and the Arrow, about which Jerry Belcher noted that it was "a best seller chronicling German resistance to the Nazi regime. It was distributed in a special Armed Services Edition to more than 150,000 American fighting men during World War II."

For his script for the 1945 film Pride of the Marines, Maltz was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay.

In February 1946 Maltz published an article (written in October 1945) for The New Masses titled "What Shall We Ask of Writers?"

in which he criticized fellow Communist writers for producing lower-quality work, owing to their placing political concerns above artistic ones.

He also referred positively in his article to the work of James T. Farrell, a Trotskyist.

This article brought upon Maltz venomous attacks from fellow CPUSA members, both in print and in person at party meetings.

He was accused of "Browderism" and in order to retain his good standing with the party he had to humiliate himself by publishing in the Daily Worker a rebuttal of his own article.

Furthermore, he "publicly denounced himself onstage at a writer's symposium chaired by party members."

Nearly 30 years after Maltz's death, the 'Albert Maltz Affair' still was a subject of discussion among scholars of Marxist movements and of the Hollywood Ten.

John Sbardellati of the University of Waterloo argued in the journal Cold War History that "by reigning [sic] in Albert Maltz, the Party rejected its earlier, more accommodating approach to popular culture, and in doing so, unwittingly forfeited a large measure of its cultural influence" and that this shift contributed to the rapid decline of "social problem films" that had emerged early in the post-war era (p. 489).

In 1947 Maltz became one of the Hollywood Ten, who refused to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee about their Communist Party membership.

On the day that Maltz appeared before the committee, October 28, 1947, he and fellow writers Dalton Trumbo and Alvah Bessie not only refused to answer the committee's central question, but also "challenged the committee's constitutionality and berated its activities," according to a reporter for The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau.

For refusing to respond, each was cited for contempt by Congress, sentenced to jail and fined, although Maltz was the only one in the group whose citation was made the subject of a record vote (a decision in which each member's vote is recorded by name), approved 346 to 17; Trumbo's citation was part of a standing vote (votes counted but not individually named), 240 to 15, and the remaining eight were cited via voice vote.

Like the others, Maltz was blacklisted by studio executives, beginning with an announcement on November 27, 1947, from the president of the Motion Picture Association of America that fifty of the field's top executives had met for two days and decided to drop all ten men from their payrolls, to hire "no known Communists" in future, and to refuse to rehire any of the blacklisted men "until he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declared under oath that he is not a Communist."

Work that debuted between the 1947 citation and 1950 assignment of sentence received some attention—almost exactly one year after his contempt citation, a Film Daily critics' poll named his The Naked City one of the top five screenplays of the 1947–48 season— but once jailed and fined, Maltz struggled to get work or credit.

In 1946, he co-wrote the screenplay for Cloak and Dagger (1946 film) with Ring Lardner, Jr. And he wrote the screenplay for the highly-praised The Naked City, released March 4, 1948, his last American screen credit for 22 years.

He was one of the Hollywood Ten who were jailed in 1950 for their 1947 refusal to testify before the US Congress about their involvement with the Communist Party USA.

They and many other US entertainment industry figures were subsequently blacklisted, which denied Maltz employment in the industry for many years.

Albert Maltz was the third of three sons born to Bernard Morris Maltz, a Russian immigrant from modern-day Lithuania, and Lena Schereaschetsky (later Sherry), also an immigrant from a Russia-controlled area.

When the jail sentences and fines were finalized, June 29, 1950, "maximum sentences of a year in jail and $1,000 fine were imposed on Ring Lardner Jr.., Lester Cole, Maltz, and Bessie", while Herbert Biberman and Edward Dmytryk received equal fines but six-month jail sentences; four additional members were set for later punishment.

Maltz was enraged at the questioning by the committee while Mississippi Democrat John E. Rankin was a member.

After Rankin described the Ku Klux Klan as "an American institution" Maltz declared that he would "not be dictated to or intimidated by men to whom the Ku Klux Klan, as a matter of committee record, is an acceptable American institution".

His screenplay for Broken Arrow won the 1951 Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Western.

In 1970 he published a new collection of short stories Afternoon in the Jungle.

While still pursuing his career as a writer of published fiction and stage drama, he branched out into writing for the screen.

Within three years he was nominated for an Academy Award for screenwriting and won one for documentary film and one special one.

Although Maltz later learned of and criticized Soviet repression, one 2009 analysis maintains, "he remained sympathetic to the anti-fascism of both the Soviet Union and the CPUSA during the 1930s," saying in a 1983 interview "the Communist party in the United States was leading the educational and organizational struggle."