Albert Maltz may be the most influential American writer you’ve never heard of. As a playwright, he won awards in the early 1930s for plays that tackled working-class issues. He received an Academy Award in 1945 for a film written to oppose anti-Semitism (The House I Live In). His 1944 novel The Cross and the Arrow, which explored German opposition to Hitler during World War II, was distributed to 140,000 American soldiers. When he won the O. Henry Memorial Prize for his short story “The Happiest Man on Earth” in 1938, the second and third place finishers were Richard Wright and John Steinbeck, respectively.
But Maltz was also a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Along with nine other members of what became known as the Hollywood Ten, Maltz challenged the committee’s constitutional legitimacy and refused to answer questions. He was subsequently charged with contempt and sentenced to a year in prison. After his release, he was blacklisted in Hollywood, spent time living abroad, and wrote sporadically under a pen name. In 1953, his works were removed from public library shelves following an order from the US Information Service to purge libraries of “Communist authors.” (As I write this, none of Maltz’s fiction is available through my local public library in Pittsburgh.)
Fortunately, Maltz’s work has seen a recent resurgence, thanks in part to Alma Books, an independent British publisher committed to republishing forgotten 20th century writing.1 Over the last few years, Alma has reprinted all but one of the five novels Maltz published while he was alive. Their most recent offering, Man on a Road and Other Stories, includes fifteen short stories from the two collections Maltz published during his lifetime, and four that remained uncollected until now.
Most of the stories in Man on a Road were published in the 30s or early 40s and draw a reader’s attention to the difficulties of Depression-era working-class lives. In “Goodbye,” a young woman escapes a Pennsylvania mill town after her father dies in an industrial accident. “The Game” focuses on a father and son who are forced to steal milk from neighbors after the father loses his job. “Season of Celebration” takes place in a New York boarding house on New Year’s Eve, where the residents struggle to make the best of their meager situations. Like much of Maltz’s fiction, the story portrays its characters as fundamentally decent but stops short of romanticizing their struggles. It also ends with the collection’s only scene of consciousness-raising, a staple of mid-century proletarian writing.
Maltz had a complicated relationship with proletarian literature, which was supposed to highlight working-class plight to prompt political change. In a 1946 essay in the left-wing journal New Masses, he argued for a broader understanding of the slogan “art is a weapon,” which he felt had been interpreted too narrowly by artists and critics. Rather than judge writing by whether it served immediate political ends, Maltz argued, we should assess writing by how well it lets readers “observe the individual richly—a complex creature of manifold dreams, desires, disappointments.” Maltz was heavily criticized for these views at the time, but this complex approach is exactly what gives his work more staying power (not to mention political relevance) than that of his more doctrinaire contemporaries.
The breadth of Maltz’s political vision is evident throughout Man on a Road. Geographically, the stories are set well beyond northeastern urban centers, where so much proletarian fiction takes place. They are formally inventive. And they address a wide range of themes, including masculinity, racial justice (which Maltz would explore more fully in his 1957 civil rights novel A Long Day in a Short Life), and the capacity for meaningful action in non-human species. A few stories even explore the gap between literary fiction and working-class lives and pose important questions about how much one means to the other, though never to the point where they seem detached or self-involved.
In the book’s title story, a driver picks up a hitchhiker in West Virginia after almost running him down with his car. The driver unsuccessfully tries to strike up conversation with his passenger before finally giving up and riding for hours in silence. When they arrive at their destination, the hitchhiker asks the driver (who he correctly guesses can write well) to copy a letter to his wife explaining why he left her. The letter, which Maltz writes out in the story, reveals to readers that the man was involved in the Hawks Nest Bridge project, one of the worst industrial disasters in American history. The project, which took place from 1930-1932, required workers to drill through silica (quartz) without a mask or safety equipment, causing hundreds to develop fatal respiratory diseases. As the man explains in his letter, he left his wife to avoid burdening her with his sickness.
When it was published in 1935, the story helped spark a congressional inquiry into the lack of concern for workers’ health on the project. As Patrick Chura notes in the introduction to the book, “on the morning the Hawks Nest Tunnel hearings opened in Washington, DC, every US congressman had on his desk a copy of ‘Man on a Road.’”
In the story, writing plays a more limited role. The letter functions as a brief opportunity for the driver to help a man who has been crushed by a system and a company (Union Carbide) that values profits over people. The two characters form no lasting bond. There’s no cure for the hitchhiker’s disease.
But “limited” is not the same as “meaningless.” Maltz debated the role of writing in political change throughout his life. But his fiction always seems confident that it has a political job to do, and that it can best do this job by offering clear, accessible prose about working-class lives (much like the narrator does in “Man on a Road”), by giving its working-class characters the justice they deserve (but no more), and by enacting a set of values that might help us think about politics from new, broader perspectives. It’s a shame that it’s taken so long for Albert Maltz to start re-emerging from the shadows of American literary history, especially since he never deserved to be there in the first place. But it’s never too late for this message.
- Maltz’s resurgence also owes something to academics like Patrick Chura, who has championed Maltz’s works for years and wrote the introductions to his works for Alma Books. Professor Chura’s essays on Maltz are accessible online. You can also find an interview where he discusses Maltz here: https://almabooks.com/an-interview-with-dr-patrick-chura-university-of-akron/. ↩︎
FICTION
Man on a Road and Other Stories
By Albert Maltz
Calder Publications
Published January 6, 2026
