Alvah Bessie spent the first twenty-four years of his life in New York City. He was born there on June 4, 1904; he attended the city's public schools and studied for four years at Columbia College where he earned an A.B. in English in 1924. Bessie's father was a stockbroker who died while Alvah was at Columbia. Following college Bessie worked until 1928 as an actor and stage manager with several theater groups in New York and Massachusetts including the Theater Guild, Walter Hampden Company, and Provincetown Players. Also in the 1920s Bessie wrote and subsequently destroyed two novels.
In 1928 Bessie went to France. He was employed there for 3 months as a rewriteman for the Paris-Times. His first published short story, “Redbird,” was written in Paris and appeared in the periodical, Transition. In 1929 he returned to America and moved to Vermont in 1930 where he lived on a farm for five years. Most of Bessie's time in Vermont was devoted to writing fiction, but he was able to supplement his income by farming and by working as a hired laborer on neighboring farms. Between 1929 and 1935 Bessie's short stories, essays and reviews were published in leading magazines including Scribner's, Saturday Review of Literature, Story, New Republic, Atlantic Monthly and Collier's. Many of his stories from those years were reprinted in anthologies. Edward J. O'Brien's Best Short Stories of 1931, and of 1932, 1933, and 1934 contained stories by Bessie. He also translated several French novels for American publishers. In 1935, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, after receiving a contract for his first novel, Dwell in the Wilderness, which was published that year.
Bessie joined the staff of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1936 as an assistant editor of the paper's Sunday magazine sections. Articles by Bessie on André Malraux and on the Spanish Civil War led to internal controversy with the editor. Bessie quit the newspaper and went to work as a public relations man in the New York office of the Spanish Information Bureau, an agency of the Spanish Republican government. A short time later (1938) Bessie went to Spain where he volunteered as an infantryman and was assigned to the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, an American unit of the Spanish Republican Army. He served as a front-line soldier and as a correspondent for the newspaper, Volunteer For Liberty. After returning to New York in 1939 Bessie wrote Men in Battle, an account of his war experiences. Long after the Spanish Civil War, Bessie remained active in efforts to assist Spanish Loyalist refugees and in organizations of American veterans of the war.
From 1939 to 1943 Bessie was drama and film editor of New Masses. In 1941, his second novel, Bread and a Stone, was published. This Is Your Enemy, an anti-Nazi pamphlet Bessie wrote in 1942, was distributed worldwide during the war. When Warner Brothers film studios hired Bessie as a contract writer in 1943, he moved to California. During the next two years he received credits for his work on the Warner Brothers films, Northern Pursuit, The Very Thought of You, Hotel Berlin and Objective Burma. He also received a writing credit for the 1947 Allied Artists film, Smart Woman.
Bessie received a subpoena in September 1947 ordering him to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which was investigating subversive influences in the motion picture industry. He appeared before HUAC on October 23, 1947, but refused to answer questions regarding his political associations. Bessie and nine other Hollywood writers, actors, directors, and producers were cited for contempt of Congress. After the case had been appealed through the courts, he served a one year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Texarkana, Texas. In 1955, Bessie was again called to testify when the Senate Internal Security Committee was investigating communist infiltration of the American press. As a result of his political views, Bessie was blacklisted by the film industry and he never again worked for a major studio under his own name. Between October 1947 and the time he went to prison in June 1950, he was able to do some screen writing by using an assumed name and by accepting half his established salary.
After his release from prison, Bessie found work (1951) when he was hired by the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) as a public relations man and assistant editor of the union newspaper, The Dispatcher. He moved to San Francisco and remained with this paper for five years. While working for the ILWU he edited an anthology of writings on the Spanish Civil War, The Heart of Spain (1951), and wrote a novel, The Un-Americans (1957). From 1956 to 1963, he worked as a stage manager, light man, and announcer at the hungry i, a San Francisco night club. During these years at the night club, Bessie wrote hundreds of film reviews, usually under the pseudonym David Ordway. With comedian Lenny Bruce, he collaborated on several screen plays, but the films were never produced. He also wrote a novel based on night club life that was slated to be published in August 1980.
In 1964 Bessie worked as a public relations man for a group of San Francisco theaters, for the San Francisco International Film Festival and for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. At that time he was also writing a nonfiction account of his experiences as one of the Hollywood Ten. It was published in 1965 as Inquisition in Eden. Throughout most of 1965, he was unemployed and he wrote another novel, The Symbol, suggested by the life of Marilyn Monroe.
Bessie went to Spain in 1967 where he collaborated on the script and played a small supporting role in the Spanish language film Espana Otra Vez. His book Spain Again described his return to Spain after thirty years. Bessie's major books have been published in England, Argentina, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Russia, Bulgaria, and Israel. He published articles in Russian, German and Czech periodicals. Bessie died on July 21, 1985, in California.
