Albert Matz

Albert Maltz (1908–85) was a prizewinning American playwright, fiction writer and screenwriter.

His first plays of the early 1930s were brave and controversial. One of them exposed corruption to the extent that local politicians tried to shut it down. Maltz’s 1933 drama Peace on Earth was probably the first American play to present modern war as the inevitable result of capitalism. He was only 24 when he wrote this.

During the Depression Maltz’s short stories were in the muckraking tradition—they drew attention to dangerous working conditions in mines and mills and factories. One of them, Man on a Road, resulted in a congressional investigation into the effects of silicosis, a deadly lung disease.

He won the O. Henry Award twice (1938 and 1941)

He moved to Hollywood in the early 1940s and adapted quickly to screenwriting work. He wrote the screenplay of The House I Live In, which starred Frank Sinatra. The purpose of this film was to strike a blow against antisemitism and to argue for religious tolerance and inclusion. For its pro-democracy messages, it won a special Academy Award.

In 1944 he published the novel The Cross and the Arrow about the German resistance to the Nazi Regime was distributed to 150,000 American soldiers during WWII.

For refusing to cooperate with the 1947 congressional investigation into alleged communist subversion, he was blacklisted, fined, sentenced to a year in prison, and thwarted as a writer for almost twenty years at the peak of his career. He became one of the Hollywood Ten.

He is best remembered today for his novels A Tale of One January, The Journey of Simon McKeever and A Long Day in a Short Life