Oral Histories
Interview of Guy Endore
Novelist, screenwriter, and activist. Member of the Communist Party.
- Subtitle:
- Reflections of Guy Endore
- Series:
- Interviews not in a series, part one
- Topic:
- Latina and Latino HistorySocial MovementsCommunist PartySleepy Lagoon CaseLiterature
- Biographical Note:
- Novelist, screenwriter, and activist. Member of the Communist Party.
- Interviewee:
- Endore, Guy
- Supporting Documents:
- Records relating to the interview are located in the office of the UCLA Library's Center for Oral History Research.
- Language:
- English
- Copyright:
- Regents of the University of California, UCLA Library.
- Abstract:
- Birth in Brooklyn; influence of mother's death; grandparents' boarding house in Pittsburgh; living with brother and three sisters in orphanage in Ohio; children moved to Vienna by father; schooling in Vienna, 1908-12; return to United States; relationship with father; childhood desire to be writer or artist; education at Columbia University; study with John Erskine; friendship with Clifton Fadiman; M.A. in Romance languages, 1925; Sorbonne fellowship; meeting with American poet Charles Norman; return to New York; work as translator; publication of first work, Casanova: His Known and Unknown Life, 1929; effect of Depression; publication of The Werewolf of Paris, 1933, Methinks the Lady, 1945, King of Paris, 1956, Voltaire! Voltaire!, 1961, and other works; dealings with publishers; writing for money; writing Babouk; speculations on human progress; doctors and disease versus quacks and symptoms; physical culture and health; society and the individual; socialism; Jack London; Emma Goldman; H. L. Mencken; Spanish Civil War; work for League against War and Fascism; Communist Party membership; Hollywood blacklist; nonconformity within Communist Party; publication of pamphlet on Sleepy Lagoon incident hampered; Harry Cohn; Screen Writers Guild; position of writers in movie studios; red-scare tactics; Helen Gahagan Douglas and Richard M. Nixon; Whittaker Chambers; House Committee on Un-American Activities; Martin Berkeley; problems of being blacklisted; Sleepy Lagoon incident; Civil Rights Congress and American Civil Liberties Union; nature of racism; Communist Party strategy relative to Hollywood Ten; Communist Party and Democratic Party; opposition to fascism; Dalton Trumbo; correspondence with Gershon Legman; Synanon Foundation; Charles Dederich; interviews with members of Synanon.