Lawson, John Howard

LAWSON, JOHN HOWARD (1894–1977). Playwright, screenwriter, and theorist, John Howard Lawson was one of the dominant figures in the radical art scene associated with the Communist movement. A third-generation American of Jewish background, Lawson was born in New York City into an affluent, progressive household. As a young boy, Lawson went on tours to Europe and Canada and across the United States. He had resolved to become a playwright by age twelve and entered Williams College at fifteen, the youngest member of his class. By the end of his sophomore year, he had published more than twenty articles in the college literary magazine. He sold his first play, Standards, to producers Sam Harris and George M. Cohan in 1915. The next year, he wrote four plays, one of which, Servant-Master-Lover, he sold to Oliver Morosco. Lawson seemed poised to become the first serious American-born playwright. World War I interrupted his writing. En route to serve with the American Red Cross, he met John Dos Passos, also a volunteer. The friendship proved to be central to Lawson. Staying on in Paris after the war with other artists of his generation, Lawson wrote Roger Bloomer, the first expressionist play of the American theater. Also the first of his works to be produced, it ran for two years. In 1925 his play Processional ran for ninety-six performances.

Lawson had meanwhile become a Communist and was elected to the national executive committee of the Proletarian Artists and Writers League. He joined with Dos Passos, Mike Gold, and others to form the New Playwrights Theater. Its purpose, Lawson explained, was to present “mass plays done for workers at prices that workers can afford.” Likewise dedicated to theatrical experimentation, the New Playwrights Theater produced Lawson’s Loudspeaker (1927) and The International (1928) before dissolving later that year.

By 1930–1931, Lawson had begun writing for the movies, completing five scripts for RKO, one of which, Bachelor Apartment, was produced. His play Success Story (later adapted for the screen as Success at Any Price) was produced in 1932 in New York. Two more plays, Gentlewoman and The Pure at Heart, opened in 1934. During the same period, Lawson helped organize the Screen Writers Guild, and remained a leading figure in it. Active in the Scottsboro case, he was twice arrested in Alabama, and served as a member of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. In 1936 Lawson published his first book, Theory and Technique of Playwrighting, which elaborated his desire to explore and expand the formal possibilities of the genre.

His political work began to take a severe toll on his artistic acceptance. In 1937, Processional was revived by the Federal Theater Project, and the Group Theater produced Marching Song, but these were the last of his plays to be produced in his lifetime. Writing for a time quite successfully for the movies, Lawson saw six of his scripts produced between 1938 and 1943: Blockade (1938), Algiers (1938), They Shall Have Music (1939), Four Sons (1940), Sahara (1943), and Action in the North Atlantic (1943). Despite his apparent respectability, as early as 1944 the Tenney Committee of California targeted Lawson and his activities—in particular his active role in the Writers Congress held in 1943 at the University of California at Los Angeles—for investigation.

Lawson suddenly faced criticism on all sides. Against Albert Maltz, who in 1946 argued in the New Masses that art had to be evaluated independently of political line, Lawson insisted on the Marxist concept of art as a form of social criticism that did not transcend the environment that creates the artist. Those Hollywood activists and others hoping for a more liberal interpretation of strategic theory in the Communist milieu looked upon Lawson as an aesthetic hard-liner. Only a year after Cosmopolitan gave Lawson an award for his cinematic contributions to the war effort, he faced indictment as a member of the “Hollywood Ten.” His final film, Smashup (1947), produced before the blacklisting went into effect, barely preceded a 1948 conviction on contempt of Congress charges and a one-year jail term (he shared a cell with Dalton Trumbo) beginning in 1950. That year, he finished a book, The Hidden Heritage, wrote a never-to-be-produced play, In Praise of Learning, edited the prison newspaper, and under a pseudonym penned a movie script for Alan Paton’s anti-apartheid classic, Cry, the Beloved Country.

Released from prison but unable to write for films under his own name, Lawson entered into a secret agreement with Edward Lewis for work to appear under Lewis’s name. Under such pen names as James Howard and James Christopher, Lawson completed scripts for a number of films, including The Careless Years (1957) and Terror in a Texas Town (1957). Lawson also continued to write critical works—Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953) and Film: The Creative Process (1964)—while lecturing on play- and screenwriting until his death. He continued to insist that form as well as content be the concern of the committed playwright.

Brown, Richard Peyron. “John Howard Lawson as an Activist Playwright, 1923–1937.” Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1964.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies. New York: The New Press, 2002.

Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Horne, Gerald. The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

John Howard Lawson Papers, 1905-1977. Morris Library, Southern Illinois University.

Lawson, John Howard. “Organizing the Screen Writers Guild.” In The Cineaste Interviews, edited by Dan Georgakas and Leonard Rubenstein. Chicago: Lake View Press, 1983.