456 Making It New: 1900–1945Then, only a year later, trouble came from the other end of the political spectrum.
As a Hollywood screenwriter now, with such movies to his credit as This Gun for
Hire (1942), he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee as
part of its inquiry into communist infiltration in the motion picture industry.
Refusing to answer the committee’s questions as to whether he was a member of the
Communist Party, he was fined and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in 1950.
Blacklisted and so unable to go back to work in Hollywood, he moved to Mexico on
his release and remained there until 1962. Despite all that, Maltz produced a
considerable body of work that, at its best, is at once radical and humane, focusing
on the individual struggle for fulfillment in oppressive circumstances. His charac-
ters remain resolutely human, often pathetically decent, despite the inhumanity
of the system against which they are forced to struggle. Maltz wrote several plays
to begin with, for the newly formed Theatre Union, among them Black Pit (1935).
But it is his stories and novels that represent his main achievement. His short story
“Man on a Road,” published in The New Masses in 1935, initiated a Congressional
investigation into the dangers of silicosis among miners. Another story, “The
Happiest Man on Earth,” published three years later, is an account of how some
people are forced to take work that will kill them, and others are forced to give them
that work, because, in a land of competition and depression, there is no alternative.
It is all the more moving because it is so laconic and ironic; its protagonist actually
feels, and says he is “the happiest man on the whole earth” when he finally persuades
his brother- in-law to let him have a job – transporting nitroglycerine. These and
similar tales were collected in The Way Things Are (1938). Two years after the
collection came out, Maltz published his first novel, focusing on the struggle between
automobile workers and an oppressive management, The Underground Stream.
Several other longer works of fiction then followed, despite other distractions and
problems. They included The Cross and the Arrow (1944), the story of a German
factory worker who has the courage to turn against his own country; The Journey
of Simon McKeever (1949), a novel of the open road the originality of which stems
from the fact that its hero has escaped from an old people’s home to pursue a
perennial American dream; and A Long Day in a Short Life (1957), a starkly realistic
account of prison life based on the writer’s own experience. Together, these longer
fictions and the earlier short stories make up a body of work that is remarkable for
its variety as well as its vitality. At its best, that work is animated by its author’s
convictions rather than overwhelmed by them; it is charged with his idealistic inten-
sity of vision and does seem, genuinely, to be part of “a great humanistic tradition.”
Like so many writers of the time who concerned themselves with the condition
of the poor, Maltz has sometimes been dismissed as a producer of social protest.
That ignores the fact that such writers might have felt drawn to portray, and may be
protest, the social conditions around them but they did so in different forms. Those
forms range from the energetic rewriting of Southwestern humor for social purposes
in Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933) by Erskine Caldwell (1903–1987),
to a more literally realistic fiction like the Studs Lonigan trilogy (Young Lonigan
(1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), Judgement Day (1935)) byGGray_c04.indd 456ray_c 04 .indd 456 8 8/1/2011 7:54:00 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 00 AM