Alvah Bessie, novelist, screenwriter, union worker, and critic, was born in New York City. His father, Daniel N. Bessie, was a successful inventor, manufacturer, and stockbroker, though not a particularly good father or husband, and Bessie has, in both his fiction and nonfiction, expressed his contempt for everything his father stood for. Bessie attended Dewitt Clinton High School, then went on to Columbia College, where he began writing poetry. After graduation in 1924, he worked as an actor with the Provincetown Players and the Theatre Guild, but convinced he would never make a very good actor, Bessie sold his library of one thousand books for a dollar each and went to Paris. There he secured a job on the Paris Times, an English-language newspaper which came out in the afternoon with translations from the French morning papers.

That job and the stay in France were short-lived (though he absorbed...