Albert Maltz began his varied, prolific writing career in the early 1930s. Some of Maltz's first stories are among the best representatives of the proletarian literature of their time. The experience gained in writing proletarian dramas and, later, screenplays can be discerned in his stories and novels, which are often highly visual and dramatic. Several major works are set in literal prisons or prisonlike environments, but other forms of repression--economic, racial, or political--can be seen as metaphorical prisons from which the individual struggles to free himself, often unsuccessfully.

Maltz was born on 28 October 1908 in Brooklyn, New York, to Bernard Maltz, a builder, and Lena Sherry Maltz. He graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, with an A.B. from Columbia College in 1930. The following two years were spent studying at Yale University's School of Drama, where he met George Sklar, with whom he wrote two proletarian dramas. In 1935, the same year...