Inside Out: A Memoir Of The Blacklist

Walter Bernstein was a war correspondent for the U.S. army magazine Yank. During World War II, he joined the Communist Party in 1946 after he was inspired by the Communist partisans in France and Yugoslavia. (He had interviewed Marshall Tito for the magazine.) Shortly afterwards Joe McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities initiated its notorious witch-hunt for Reds in the government and, to garner publicity, in Hollywood, where Bernstein had become a writer for film and television. Though he successfully avoided appearing before the Committee, Bernstein was blacklisted, and forced to scrape a living together by selling his scripts through front men. In this memoir, he recalls the days of the blacklist, celebrates the movie business, and defends his political allegiances.