Maltz ranks among the best of American short-story writers, both in his versatility and in the sheer power of his prose. The stories selected for this volume are considered classics and have been translated into more than 20 languages. All display Maltz at his most provocative.

The titular story in this collection, ‘Man on a Road’ – which famously led to the 1936 congressional hearings that exposed the worst industrial disaster in American history – is a snapshot of appalling capitalist exploitation from the perspective of a walking-dead miner slowly suffocating from silicosis. ‘The Happiest Man on Earth’, winner of the 1938 O. Henry Award, is about a man who, desperate to feed his family and regain his dignity, embarks on a long journey on foot in his quest for a job, while ‘The Way Things Are’ renders the terrors of the Jim Crow South with unflinching realism, foreshadowing the aesthetics and politics of the civil-rights movement.

Albert Maltz, one of the “Hollywood Ten” of the McCarthy era, spent ten months in prison and twenty years on the blacklist as a banned artist forced to write under a pseudonym. With this collection of stories, spanning forty years of his career and including previously uncollected works, his long-silenced voice returns, re-establishing him as a master of hard-hitting but compassionate short fiction.

‘Circus Come to Town’ received the Normandy Pen Award for literature in 1952.

‘Husband and Wife’: Written in 1961, this story was unpublished during Maltz’s lifetime, but was adapted for television in the United States in 1962 under the title The Great Alberti. It is published here for the first time.

‘This book includes nineteen of Albert Maltz’s short stories, the first nine of which were inspired by his epic deep-dive into Depression-era America. On his down-classing journey, Maltz intended not just to observe how the “other half” lives, but to suffer alongside it in the factories, mines and coal camps. Armed with press credentials from both the stodgy New York Post and the radical New Masses, he could operate on either side of the class divide—and he did.’ – From the Introduction by Patrick Chura

Find out more about award-winning short story writer and respected novelist Albert Maltz

Part of Calder Publications imprint