Albert+Maltz

Albert Maltz (1908-1985)

Albert Maltz was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of immigrants; his father, beginning as a grocer’s boy, had become a contractor and builder. Maltz attended public schools and Columbia University, where he majored in philosophy and graduated in 1930. He then enrolled in the Yale Drama School to study. Maltz soon turned to writing fiction, and it is on his stories and novels that his reputation rests. “Man on a Road,” published in the //New Masses// in 1935, sparked a Congressional investigation of the dangers of silicosis to miners; this story was later widely reprinted. Maltz’s excellent novella “Season of Celebration,” which focuses on a dying man in a Bowery flophouse won recognition when it appeared in 1938. “The Happiest Man on Earth” won the O. Henry Memorial Award as the best short story in 1938. These and other stories were collected and published under the title //The Way Things Are.// Both the principal strength and the central weakness of Maltz’s work arise from his desire to fulfill an ideal of proletarian art and yet not betray “the great humanistic tradition of culture” by serving “an individual political purpose.” The tension between these aims caused him some personal trouble as well as artistic ambivalence. Maltz is at his best when his political sympathies animate but do not overwhelm his narrative gift. In stories like “Man on a Road” and “The Happiest Man on Earth,” a muted undercurrent of anger at injustice and suffering renders the protest extremely effective. But when he becomes openly didactic, Maltz’s indignation subverts character, plot, and even feeling, as in his first novel, //The Underground Stream,// which focuses on the struggle between auto industry workers seeking to organize unions and the fascistic management who resist them. Here the characters act simply as one-dimensional mouthpieces, delivering various political viewpoints, rather than developing believably. Albert Maltz moved to Hollywood in 1941 to write screenplays primarily for Warner Brothers and Paramount studios. During WW II, he wrote patriotic scripts for such films as //Destination Tokyo// (1944), //Pride of the Marines// (1945), and //Cloak and Dagger// (1946) His 1942 script for //Moscow Strikes Back//, won him an Oscar for best documentary. His endeavor for //The House I Live In//, won a special Academy Award in 1945. While Maltz was working in Hollywood as a screenwriter, this career was to be interrupted in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee reinstituted its investigation into Communist infiltration in the motion picture industry. Maltz, along with nine other writers and producers, a group thereafter known as “the Hollywood Ten,” challenged the constitutional legitimacy of that committee on First Amendment grounds. Refusing to answer the committee’s questions as to whether he was a member of the Communist Party and the Screenwriters’ Guild, Maltz was fined and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in 1950. Blacklisted in Hollywood and so unable to work there for many years, he moved to Mexico after his release from prison and remained there until 1962. Albert Maltz died in Los Angeles in 1985. His constant literary concern for an idealized vision of democracy links his work to the American tradition of Emerson and Whitman. His fiction regularly focuses on the individual’s struggle for self-realization under confinement in some prison-like situation; always Maltz’s faith in human decency, in the viability of the human struggle for a better life, and in the need for spiritual liberation triumph over the forces of repression. [|www.moderntimes.com/maltz] [|www.miracosta.cc.ca.us/home/llane/courses/hist111/pw/docs/huac.htm]