Before the blacklist: the fiction and film work of Hollywood screenwriters

This dissertation examines the novels, plays, and films written by a group of Hollywood screenwriters who share the political experience of being called to testify at the House un-American Activities Committee hearings starting in the late 1940s. Because of their targeting by HUAC, these writers are typically remembered for their contributions to US cinema, their leftism, and their political repression. Extending the scope of analysis beyond film to include the fiction they wrote throughout the 1930s and 1940s, this dissertation reveals the writers’ multiform strategies for political expression. Intertextual analysis of their literature and pre-HUAC films demonstrates how they engaged in profoundly imaginative terms major ideological issues, in particular the tension between collectivism and individuality that has prevailed in U.S. politics and social life. The first chapter treats Albert Maltz’s first novel, The Underground Stream (1940), and first credited screenplay, This Gun for Hire (1942). These works address the mutually constitutive relationship between individuals and political organizations. Chapter two analyzes Vera Caspary’s Depression-era plays about working-class women, which explore how class relations shape private experience. Chapter three turns to Lillian Hellman’s play, The Little Foxes, and its film adaptation. Staging how women dissent from the bourgeois patriarchal family and the racial oppression that underlies it, Hellman’s work probes the ways in which women characters engage with ideals of “individualism.” Chapter four focuses on the historical novels and film westerns of John Sanford and Guy Endore. This chapter takes a comparative approach in order to foreground how these writers pursue radical analysis and promote a collectivist politics through the novel form. Their film westerns similarly situate audiences in the past but dispense with the polemical historicity of their novels in favor of a more studio-friendly view of the transcendent, pre-ideological subject.2024-10-03T00:00:00