Albert Maltz (28 October 1908 – 26 April 1985) was an American playwright, fiction writer, and screenwriter who was jailed in 1950, along with the other members of the "Hollywood Ten", for refusing to testify about his Communist Party USA affiliation.
Biography[]
Albert Maltz was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York on 28 October 1908 to an affluent Jewish family, and he went to Columbia University and the Yale School of Drama. He became a member of Communist Party USA out of conviction, supporting an end to all forms of human exploitation. Maltz became a playwright in the 1930s and wrote proletarian literature, and he won the short story "O. Henry Award" twice. In 1944, he wrote a bestselling novel about the German Resistance in Nazi Germany, and the book was given to over 150,000 American military personnel during World War II. In February 1946, he was ostracized within CPUSA for criticizing other communist writers for focusing too much on politics and less on art, and he suffered venomous attacks both on print and in person at party meetings after giving a Trotskyist author's works positive reviews. He was forced to rebuke his own article with a new article and was humiliated, but he stayed loyal to his party in 1947, refusing to testify before the US Congress about his involvement with the CPUSA. He was jailed in 1950, serving a year in prison. He was denied employment in the film industry for years due to his status as a member of the "Hollywood blacklist", and he made a film in 1970 and another in 1974. He died in Los Angeles, California in 1985 at the age of 76.