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Historical records matching John Howard Lawson
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About John Howard Lawson
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/hollywood-ten-men-who-refus...
Born in New York City to a wealthy family, Lawson (ne Levy) wrote his first play (A Hindoo Love Drama) at age 16 as an undergraduate at Williams College. Following a stint as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, where he served alongside Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and E.E. Cummings, Lawson edited a newspaper in Rome and worked as a publicity director for the American Red Cross. During the 1920s and 1930s, he began writing left-leaning plays, some of which made it to Broadway.
He sold his first script in 1920 to Paramount, and eight years later MGM offered him a writing contract. In 1933, he co-founded the Screen Writers Guild, serving as its first president. That same year he also wrote two Broadway plays and joined the Communist Party. In 1938, he earned his lone Oscar nomination, for best story, for Blockade, a Spanish Civil War drama starring Henry Fonda. The Knights of Columbus denounced it as “Marxist propaganda.”
When it was Lawson’s turn to testify at the HUAC hearings in 1947, he attempted to make a statement but was silenced by the thundering gavel of the committee chairman, J. Parnell Thomas. Lawson served his 12-month sentence at the minimum-security federal correctional facility in Ashland, Kentucky.
After his release, Lawson moved to Mexico, where, in 1951, he wrote the screen adaptation for a British production of Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country, which was the first film to depict apartheid in South Africa. Lawson was originally not credited, with Paton cited as the screenwriter. In an interview with The New York Times, he said, “I’m much more completely blacklisted than the others. I’m much more notorious and extremely proud of that. It had much to do with the fact that I helped organize the Guild.”
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John Howard Lawson's Timeline
| 1895 |
September 25, 1895
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New York, NY, United States
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| 1919 |
July 13, 1919
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New York, NY, United States
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| 1977 |
August 11, 1977
Age 81
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San Francisco, San Francisco County, CA, United States
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