Robert Rossen began his screenwriting career as a contract writer in Hollywood during the 1930s and in the late 1940s became a successful producer and director. Rossen's career was interrupted by the blacklisting of the McCarthy era, but it resumed in the mid-1950s with a series of forceful and original films. As a screenwriter and later a producer and director, Rossen preferred to work with contemporary American stories and themes, but his range extended to historical epics and dramas with foreign locales. Although the quality of his work varies, it displays a remarkable continuity in theme, often focusing on the effects of power and ambition on the individual. Several of his films, most notably Body and Soul (1947), All the King's Men (1949), and The Hustler (1961), hold respected places in the history of postwar American cinema.

Robert Rossen was born in the Rivington Street section of New York's East...