Circus come to town [antikvár]

Albert Maltz—American dramatist, novelist, scriptwriter and * author of short stories—was born in New York in 1908. As a child he lived in one of the immigrants' quarters of this city. j So he came to know very early both faces of New York and of i, America—light and luxury on the one hand and poverty and ii misery on the other. i Maltz attended the high school and studied drama at Yale University for two years. He began writing in the thirties. He j wrote plays, novels and short stories full of social criticism. One i; of his best-known works is the novel " The Cross and the Arrow", > 1 a book about an ordinary German worker who comes to take t action against his Nazi rulers during the Second World War. This book was published in 1944. In the forties Maltz was one of the most successful Hollywood scriptwriters. But when in f; 1950—because of his progressive political attitude—the "Com- ', mittee for Unamerican Activities" sentenced him to one year imprisonment together with nine other Hollywood authors, ivork became very difficult for him in the U.S.A. So he went into voluntary exile in Mexico, where he lived from 1951 to 1962. Now he is living in California. Albert Maltz is a talented short story writer. He describes with great sympathy and understanding the life and everyday problems of simple American people. Time and again his stories deal with the years of the Depression which brought hunger and unemployment for millions of Americans. Michael Gold, dean of the proletarian writers of America, wrote in his introduction to a book of short stories by Albert Maltz: "Shelley once said of himself that he was a nerve along which crept all the vast suffering of the poor, otherwise unseen and unrecorded. This might serve as one definition of a proletarian writer, and it describes particularly the short stories of Albert Maltz."