Albert Maltz Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life
Albert Maltz was born in 1908 in Brooklyn, New York, and came of age amid the turbulence of World War I's aftermath and the economic convulsions that led to the Great Depression. As a young man he gravitated to literature and the stage, discovering in storytelling a way to dramatize social conflicts and personal moral choice. The urban neighborhoods of his youth, with their mix of ethnic communities and working-class struggle, shaped his lifelong interest in social justice and the dignity of ordinary people.

Emergence as a Writer
By the 1930s Maltz had begun writing fiction and plays that combined craftsmanship with political conscience. He was part of a generation of American writers who believed that art should not turn away from the hardest realities of the time: joblessness, war, racism, and the fragility of democratic norms. His novel The Cross and the Arrow, published during World War II, told of ordinary Germans resisting Nazism, and it circulated widely among American readers, including service members, for its portrait of courage under dictatorship. Maltz's prose was plainspoken, dramatic, and attentive to ethical dilemmas, qualities that would carry into his screenwriting.

Hollywood Career
Maltz moved to screenwriting in the early 1940s and quickly found a place at major studios. He shared screenplay credit on This Gun for Hire, adapted from a Graham Greene novel and starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, working alongside veteran writer W. R. Burnett. He brought a sharp social intelligence to genre material, balancing suspense with psychological clarity. With Pride of the Marines, directed by Delmer Daves and starring John Garfield and Eleanor Parker, Maltz helped craft a humane study of wartime trauma and recovery, based on the real-life Marine Al Schmid, a blinded hero of Guadalcanal. He also wrote the script for The House I Live In, a short film featuring Frank Sinatra that argued for religious and racial tolerance; the film received an Academy Award, and its message of pluralism became a cultural touchstone of the mid-1940s.

Political Commitments and Debate
Like many writers of his era, Maltz was involved in left-wing politics and joined the Communist Party USA during a period when antifascism and labor rights animated the cultural front. In 1946 he ignited a major debate with his essay What Shall We Ask of Writers?, published in the radical press, arguing that literature should not be reduced to political slogans and that artistic truth must not be subordinated to party doctrine. The essay drew a sharp rebuke from cultural officials like V. J. Jerome and provoked disputes among colleagues over the line between art and ideology. Under pressures that were personal, political, and professional, Maltz later withdrew parts of his argument, a retreat that he and others would revisit as the cultural climate changed.

The Hollywood Ten and Imprisonment
The Cold War mobilization and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) soon transformed debate into confrontation. In 1947 Maltz was subpoenaed and, along with Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Ring Lardner Jr., Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Samuel Ornitz, Edward Dmytryk, and Adrian Scott, refused to answer questions about political affiliation or to name colleagues. The group became known as the Hollywood Ten. Cited for contempt of Congress, they were fined and sentenced to prison terms. Maltz served time in federal custody, and upon release he faced an industry-wide blacklist that made open employment all but impossible.

Blacklist Years and Work Under Fronts
Denied screen credit and regular studio work, Maltz continued to write. Like several blacklisted peers, he sometimes placed material through friends or fronts while also returning to fiction. He remained in touch with colleagues who shared his predicament, including people such as Herbert Biberman and Michael Wilson, who were themselves building independent projects when possible and arguing for the right to work. The costs of the blacklist were severe: isolation, financial strain, and the loss of official authorship on projects shaped by his pen. Yet the discipline of his earlier work persisted. His stories retained their concern with the pressures exerted by history upon private lives and the responsibilities individuals owe to one another.

Collaborators and Colleagues
Maltz's Hollywood years brought him into close collaboration with influential artists. With John Garfield, whose own battles with political scrutiny ended in tragedy, he found an actor attuned to complicated, decent men under duress. With Frank Sinatra on The House I Live In, Maltz helped articulate a mainstream argument for tolerance at a time when such statements carried real weight. His professional circle also included writers and producers like W. R. Burnett and directors such as Delmer Daves, whose craftsmanship and instincts for character matched Maltz's aims. During and after the blacklist, he remained linked to the larger cohort of the Hollywood Ten and their allies, even as paths diverged; Edward Dmytryk's decision to testify, for example, underscored the fractures the period produced within once-unified groups.

Return of Credit and Later Years
As political temperatures cooled in the 1960s and 1970s, the blacklist's hold on the industry weakened. Maltz was able to work more openly, and the Writers Guild of America later undertook efforts to restore proper credits to blacklisted writers whose names had been removed or concealed during the period. These restorations recognized not only individual contributions but also the historical record of a generation's labor under duress. Maltz, who had spent decades insisting on the integrity of the writer's craft, saw the slow vindication of that principle as his name reattached to work long associated with others.

Death and Legacy
Albert Maltz died in 1985. His career traced a distinctive arc across twentieth-century American culture: a rise from the Depression-era literary left to a prominent Hollywood practice; a devastating clash with state power and industry conformity; and a stubborn persistence that kept him writing through eclipse and after. He is remembered for taut, character-driven screenplays like This Gun for Hire and Pride of the Marines; for a moral clarity that informed The House I Live In; for fiction such as The Cross and the Arrow; and for a critical intelligence brave enough to pose difficult questions about art and ideology. Among his peers in the Hollywood Ten, including Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, and others, Maltz stands out as a writer who fused craft to conscience. The durability of his best work lies in its insistence that human beings can act decently in indecent times, and that the demands of truth in art remain, even when history makes the telling costly.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Albert, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Justice - Freedom - Equality - Graduation.