KAHN, Gordon [Herbert Biberman; Lester Cole; Adrian Scott; Ring Lardner Jr; Alvah Bessie].
Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the Ten Who Were Indicted.
New York: Boni & Gaer, 1948.
$1,400.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152471
+$500
First Edition of Gordon Kahn's Hollywood on Trial; Signed by Five Members of the Hollywood Ten
First edition of this early and courageous account of the case of the Hollywood Ten, published at the height of the postwar Red Scare. Octavo, original grey cloth stamped in green. Signed by five members of the Hollywood Ten on the front free endpaper: Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Adrian Scott, Ring Lardner Jr., and Alvah Bessie. In 1947 these men, all screenwriters or directors, refused on First Amendment grounds to answer the House Un-American Activities Committee's questions about alleged Communist affiliations. Cited for contempt of Congress and imprisoned, they were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, their careers destroyed for years. Very good in a very good dust jacket. Foreword by Thomas Mann.
Hollywood on Trial was among the first books to document the 1947 hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee into alleged Communist influence in the motion picture industry and the plight of the Hollywood Ten. Its author, Gordon Kahn, was himself a screenwriter who was named and blacklisted, and who later left the country for Mexico. He wrote the book as a contemporary defense of his colleagues, with a foreword by the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, who had emigrated from Nazi Germany and warned against the parallels he saw in the committee's methods. The Hollywood Ten, Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo, became enduring symbols of the era's assault on civil liberties, and the blacklist that followed reshaped the American film industry for a generation.
Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the Ten Who Were Indicted.
$1,400.00
In Stock