A LONG DAY IN A SHORT LIFE

A novel about the racial tension of America and the failure of the American dream.

The second novel by Albert Maltz, a very talented writer and an important script writer in Hollywood. For refusing to cooperate with the 1947 congressional investigation into alleged communist subversion, he was blacklisted, fined, sentenced to a year in prison and thwarted as a writer for almost twenty years at the peak of his career. He became one of the Hollywood Ten.
Maltz was committed to the Federal jail in Washington, DC, in June 1950. Although he would serve the main part of his sentence at Mill Point Prison in West Virginia, he remained in the DC lockup for eighteen days. It was there that A Long Day in a Short Life was conceived. The introduction by Professor Patrick Chura will give you more insight into this novel about the racial tensions of America and the failure of the American dream.

As time ticks along with indifference, the inmates of the Washington District Jail drag on their daily routine behind bars. Innocent at their birth, these frail creatures who have lost their way now spend their lives shut out of society, deprived of all freedom, with little prospect of being readmitted into the human fold.
Each prisoner has a story: some of them are charged with crimes of assault, murder and manslaughter, others of forgery, robbery and larceny - others still are not guilty of anything other than having been born to certain parents at a certain time in a certain country. A Long Day in a Short Life - Maltz's first novel to be published in the UK after being "blacklisted" by the US government - is a powerful indictment of the penal system and a strong reminder about the underlying humanity of each individual.

Albert Maltz (1908-85) was a prizewinning American playwright, fiction writer and screenwriter. His novel The Cross and the Arrow, about the German resistance to the Nazi regime, was distributed to 150,000 American soldiers during the Second World War. He worked on a number of films, including Casablanca, until he was blacklisted during McCarthyism. He is best remembered today for his novels A Tale of One January and The Journey of Simon McKeever.