Blacklisted Writer Dies

From the San Jose Mercury News

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/5349521.htm

Posted on Saturday, March 8, 2003

John Sanford, prolific, blacklisted writer, dies at 98

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. John Sanford, a prolific writer who was blacklisted in the 1950s for his membership in the Communist Party, has died. He was 98.

Sanford died of an aortic aneurysm Thursday [March 6, 2003] at a hospital near his home in Montecito, said his grandnephew, Jerry Gustafson.

A Communist for most of his life who never renounced his party membership, Sanford wrote about dark passages in American history, such as slavery and the execution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927. He had 24 books published and was often compared to William Carlos Williams and John Dos Passos.

Sanford was perhaps best known for "A More Goodly Country," published in 1975. It earned critical acclaim as a literary and profoundly personal examination of American experience, beginning with early encounters of the continent by Leif Ericson.

None of his books made money but he continued to write daily.

His constant subject over the last decade was his beloved wife, screenwriter Marguerite Roberts, who died in 1989. His last book about her, "A Palace of Silver," published by Capra Press in January, earned him a measure of attention.

"He was a consummate writer who was never willing to make any kind of U-turn or concession toward greater commercial success. At heart he felt that was a virtue," said Richard Barre, associate publisher at Capra.

A descendant of Russian immigrants, Sanford was born Julian Lawrence Shapiro on May 31, 1904, in New York's Harlem.

His first novel, "The Water Wheel," was published in 1933. Three years later, Paramount invited him to Hollywood and signed him to a six-month contract. He met Roberts there and married her in 1938.

She and Sanford collaborated on "Honky Tonk," a 1941 romantic Western that starred Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Lana Turner. He was offered a screenwriting contract by MGM, which already employed his wife. But Roberts was against it.

"She said, 'If you sign that contract you're never going to write another book. I can support us,'" said Jack Mearns, Sanford's literary executor.

Sanford took her advice and went home to spend the rest of his life writing.

Roberts became one of the most highly paid screenwriters in the business, churning out hits for Robert Mitchum, Robert Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Gable and Turner.

She joined the Communist Party because Sanford was a member and she wanted to be with him when he went to meetings. He did not object at the time, but deeply regretted it later.

"She went to maybe four meetings in her life, I mean real meetings," Sanford told author Griffin Fariello in the 1995 book, "Red Scare."

In 1951, they were subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee but refused to cooperate by naming names of other communists in Hollywood. They spent the next decade in internal exile. No one would hire Roberts, and because she could not write, neither could Sanford.

When the political climate began to ease in 1960, both plunged back into their work.

In 1964, he wrote "Every Island Fled Away" and spent the next three years writing historical vignettes, producing more than 200 vignettes that make up "A More Goodly Country."

Sanford continued the vignette style in his autobiographical works. The first in his memoir series was "The Color of the Air: Scenes From the Life of an American Jew," published by Black Sparrow Press in 1985. Four more volumes were published from 1986 to 1991.

"He would like to be seen as a wonderful writer and a good husband to Maggie," said Sanford's literary executor Mearns. "Those are the two things he would value most."

Information from: Los Angeles Times

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8129-2003Mar10.html

From The Washington Post, March 11, 2003

John Sanford, Writer

John Sanford, 98, a prolific writer who was blacklisted in the 1950s for his membership in the Communist Party, died of an aortic aneurysm March 6 in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Mr. Sanford, a communist for most of his life who never renounced his party membership, wrote about such dark passages in American history as slavery and the execution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927. He published 24 books and was compared to William Carlos Williams and John Dos Passos.

He was perhaps best known for "A More Goodly Country," a 1975 book written in the vignette style. He continued using the vignette style in his five autobiographical works, beginning with "The Color of the Air: Scenes From the Life of an American Jew."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/obituaries/16SANF.html

From The New York Times, March 16, 2003

John Sanford, Author and Memoirist, Dies at 98

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

John Sanford, a novelist, historian and memoirist who often focused his moral fables on the Adirondacks, died on March 6 in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 98 and lived in Montecito, Calif.

His memoir of his life from 1904 to 1927, "The Color of the Air: Scenes From the Life of an American Jew, Volume I," was published in 1985.

Four more volumes in the autobiographical series followed.

Mr. Sanford's original name was Julian Lawrence Shapiro; he changed it in 1940. He also wrote as Julian L. Shapiro and as John B. Sanford.

His career as a writer was hurt by his membership in the Communist Party and his related blacklisting. He mostly wrote novels until 1975, when he began collections of historical vignettes as well as autobiographical and other works.

In 1982 his novel "A Man Without Shoes," which he had finished in 1947, was finally published. It had been spurned by many publishers over the years, though an edition had been privately printed.

In all, Mr. Sanford published 24 books. He received a PEN award for "The Color of the Air."

A native of Manhattan, he was an alumnus of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and of Fordham University in New York.

Mr. Sanford married the former Marguerite Roberts, a screenwriter, in 1938. She died in 1989.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sanford

John Sanford

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Sanford (1904 - March 6, 2003) was an American author. Born Julian Lawrence Shapiro in Harlem, New York City, he was a childhood friend of author Nathanael West. Young Julian studied law at Fordham University, but when West told him that he was writing a book, Julian decided that that was what he wanted to do with his life.

He and West moved to Hollywood together, and Julian Shapiro changed his name to John Sanford because of his concerns over anti-Semitism. He had stories published in European literary journals, and in 1933 wrote his first novel, The Water Wheel.

In 1936, Sanford signed a writing contract with Paramount Studios. It was there that he met fellow writer Marguerite Roberts, and the two married two years later. They collaborated on the film Honky Tonk in 1941. Soon afterwards, Sanford was offered a writing contract by MGM, but Roberts urged him to stop writing movie and to concentrate on writing books, which he did.

Sanford was a member of the Communist Party, and his wife Roberts accompanied him to a few Party meetings, but she never devoted herself to the cause as he had, although she did officially joined the Party. This cost the couple in the 1950s, when they were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. They were banned by Hollywood until, ironically, 1969, when Roberts co-wrote True Grit, starring anti-Communist actor John Wayne.

In 1964, Sanford wrote the novel Every Island Fled Away, but it was his work The People From Heaven which has been called his master work. The story of a racist in a small town who rapes an African American woman, beats a Native American and tries to drive the only Jew out of town, it was attacked by Sanford's fellow Communists as "antisocial", but fellow author William Carlos Williams (with whom Sanford has been compared) called it "the most important book published here in the last 20 years."

Sanford eventually turned from fiction to write history and biography. But his works were distinctive, in that they tended to be made up of small vignettes, instead of broad chapters and themes. His A More Goodly Country, a history of the United States, consists of more than 200 vignettes as seen through the eyes of such participants as Leif Ericsson, Christopher Columbus, Henry David Thoreau, Pocahontas, Stephen Crane, Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. It took him three years to complete. It was turned down by 247 publishers, before finally being published. It was dedicated to Williams.

Marguerite Roberts died in 1989, and the last few years of Sanford's life were largely dedicated to writing about his relationship with his wife. He continued to write until a month before his death, due to failing eyesight.

Sanford published nine novels, five works he called "creative interpretations of history" and 10 volumes of autobiography and memoirs, including the five-book sequence, Scenes From the Life of an American Jew. Four more unpublished works were discovered among his effects.

An abbreviated Biblography

An excerpt from Sanford's Pearl Harbor segment of A More Goodly Country:

This time, the air was stiff with sound, and if God had chosen to speak, He'd've found no room for His radiant waves among the waves already there. Adore and be still! He might've said, but only other planets would've heard. The earth was listening to recipes, to longing sung and played, to the scores made in games; it was also listening to the traffic of ciphered signals to and from Japan, but that was merely noise behind eulogies of oleo, spiels for gasoline. There was wind in the east, and coming on the wind was rain, but no sign of these could be seen as yet -- the sky was still clear, and it might stay fine all day.