Born in New York City. During WW I he served in Europe as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross, along with Hemingway, Dos Passos, and e. e. cummings. After the Armistice, he settled in Rome, where he edited a newspaper and was a publicity director for the American Red Cross. In the 1920s and 30s he wrote many plays, often on proletarian Marxist themes, nine of which were produced successfully on the Broadway stage. He made his first contact with film in 1920, when he sold an unproduced script to Paramount. In 1928 he went to Hollywood as a contract writer and subsequently wrote screenplays, original stories, and dialogue for a variety of films. He was a co-founder of the Screen Writers Guild and its first president in 1933. In addition to many features -- which included such politically inspired films as BLOCKADE (1938), about the Spanish Civil War, and COUNTER-ATTACK (1945), a salute to the US-USSR fighting alliance -- he collaborated on the script of Paul Strand's documentary THE HEART OF SPAIN (1937). Other notable writing credits (alone or in collaboration) include DYNAMITE (1929), ALGIERS (1938), THEY SHALL HAVE MUSIC (1939), EARTHBOUND (also co-producer), FOUR SONS and FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT (uncredited) (all 1940), ACTION IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC and SAHARA (both 1943) and SMASH-UP, THE STORY OF A WOMAN (1947). His career came to an abrupt halt in 1948 when, as one of the Hollywood Ten, he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for refusing to cooperate with House Un-American Activities Committee investigators. Blacklisted by the film industry, he went into self-exile in Mexico. He wrote two more screenplays that were produced, either without credit [CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTY (1951)], or under the pseudonym "Edward Lewis" [THE CARELESS YEARS (1957)]. He authored several books on drama and film -- including Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting (1949), Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953), and Film: The Creative Process (1964) -- and lectured on the theater and cinema at a number of American universities.    Nominated for Writing (Original Story) 1938: BLOCKADE 1 nomination