Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist

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During World War II, Walter Bernstein was a correspondent for the U.S. Army magazine Yank; after the war, he joined the Communist Party. When Senator Joseph McCarthy began his notorious witch hunt for Communists in the late 1940s, Bernstein—a writer for film and television—found himself blacklisted. For a decade he would scrape a living together by selling scripts through front men. Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post has called Inside Out "a lovely piece of work . . . a memoir of the blacklist that, without minimizing any of its offenses or forgiving any of its architects, finds humanity and humor in the period." The author vividly recalls an entertainment community torn between those who were willing and those who refused to denounce their friends, and he provides unforgettable glimpses of leading Hollywood figures such as Burt Lancaster, Elia Kazan, Bette Davis, and Zero Mostel. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer has hailed this as, simply, "the best personal account of the era."