Writer Gordon Kahn was born on May 11, 1902 in Szigedt, Hungary. When he was still a young child his parents immigrated to the United States and young Gordon grew up on New York's lower East Side. After graduating from Townsend Harris High School in New York City in 1918, he attended Yale University for a year. At this time he also started his journalistic career as a cub reporter for Connecticut's Bridgeport Star.
In 1919 Kahn moved back to New York and entered the School of Journalism at Columbia University. He was more concerned with gaining a practical rather than a formal education, however, and he first took a job with the New York Herald and then with Zitt's Theatrical Weekly. For Zitt's he wrote a Broadway column in the style of Samuel Pepys.
In 1922 he shared an apartment in Greenwich Village with artist Al Hirschfeld, and they collaborated on a book about New York speakeasies, Manhattan Oases. Hirschfeld did the illustrations for the book.
During much of the 1920s Kahn wrote for the New York Daily Mirror and there he was associated with Samuel Marx, who later became head of the scenario department at MGM in Hollywood. In 1930 Marx wrote to Kahn, asking him to come to the West Coast and join the studio. That was the beginning of a new career for the young writer.
Kahn remained in Hollywood for the next two decades, writing primarily for Republic and MGM. He also worked for Universal, Paramount and Warner Brothers. Among his screenplays were The Sheik Steps Out (1937), Buy Me That Town (1941), A Yank on the Burma Road (1942), Two O'Clock Courage (1945), Ruthless (1948), and Whiplash (1948). Altogether Kahn was credited with nearly thirty screenplays.
Always interested in liberal causes, Kahn was active in the Screen Writers Guild and served first as managing editor and then as editor of its journal, The Screen Writer. It was this activity that led to his subpoena in 1947 as an “unfriendly witness” by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating Communist influence in Hollywood. Kahn was not called to testify so he did not become a member of the Hollywood Ten. In 1948, however, he wrote a book, Hollywood on Trial, about the injustice of the proceedings, and the book put an immediate and permanent end to his employment by Hollywood studios. Kahn was effectively blacklisted for the rest of his life.
From 1950 to 1956 Kahn and his family chose to live in Mexico; there Kahn worked on a novel. In 1956 they moved to Manchester, New Hampshire where Kahn lived for the remaining six years of his life. During that time he wrote magazine articles, primarily for Holiday and The Atlantic Monthly; all of the articles were written under pseudonym.
Gordon Kahn died on December 31, 1962, and was survived by his wife, Barbara Brodie Kahn, and two sons.
