Albert Halper (1904–1984) was an American novelist and playwright.
Life
Albert Halper was born on a kitchen table on the west side of Chicago on August 3, 1904, the son of Lithuanian immigrants from Vilna. His father, Isaac, owned a series of tiny grocery stores; his mother, Rebecca, stayed at home, raising their six children. After graduating Marshall High School, young Albert worked in a factory, warehouse, and post office, all the time committed to becoming a writer. the death of his mother in 1928 eliminated his sole reason for remaining in Chicago, and when offered a promotion at the post office, he quit the next day and soon left for New York.
In New York, he became a protégé of
Elliot E. Cohen
Elliot E. Cohen (March 14, 1899 – May 28, 1959) was the founder and first editor of ''Commentary''.
Background
While an undergraduate at Yale, Cohen contributed light verse to a campus humor magazine, ''The Yale Record''.
Career
Menorah Jou ...
, the brilliant editor of the ''Menorah Journal,'' and began to publish in the American Mercury, Dial, and other prominent literary magazines. His first novel, Union Square (1933), traces the lives of Depression era New Yorkers living in that neighborhood, and was a best seller and a Literary Guild selection. The Foundry (1934), a novel of factory life, also was widely praised. Considered one of the most promising writers to appear during the Depression, he was awarded a residency at the Yaddo writers colony and a Guggenheim fellowship. With the end of the Depression, Halper found the "Depression writer" label an obstacle, and though he continued to produce, he was unable to regain the prominence he had earlier experienced. Many of these later efforts, however, are of high quality, especially his collection of short stories, The Golden Watch (1953), and his memoir, Good-bye, Union Square (1970).
What distinguished Halper as a writer was his characteristic slangy, conversational style, his skill in bringing characters to life, and his uncanny ability to reproduce context and ambience. Above all a story teller, he predated postmodern intellectualizing, but the simplicity of his prose signaled not a casual, slap-dash approach to writing, but instead a deliberate strategy cunningly designed to immerse the reader in the story. As a result of his childhood poverty and his literary focus on workers, Halper was sometimes called a proletarian writer, a title he rejected both because it implied allegiance to the Communist Party and a lack of interest in non-proletarian segments of society. Instead, he said that his "subjects were people in a variety of situations." Communists were not hard to find in Depression New York, but Halper never joined the party and in his memoir revealed his horror at the cruelty he observed at a meeting of the John Reed Club. Later, in the 1940s, he was traumatized, when he learned that his close friend and agent,
Maxim Leiber, was a Soviet operative, who had betrayed his trust and brought him to the attention of the FBI.
A lifelong city person, Halper in his 60s moved to a small house in the country outside Pawling, New York, where he lived the rest of his life. He died on January 15, 1984, at age 79. He was survived by his wife
Lorna Blaine Halper, a painter who died in 2012, and his son, Thomas.
Works
Novels
* Union Square (1933, 1990)
* Foundry (1934)
* On the Shore (1934)
* Chute (1937)
* Sons of the Fathers (1940)
* Little People (1942, 1976)
* Only an Inch from Glory (1943)
* DruhaÌ Generace (1948)
* Golden Watch (1953)
* Atlantic Avenue (1956)
* Fourth Horseman of Miami Beach (1966)
* Chicago Crime Book (1967)
Plays
* Top Man
* My Aunt Daisy
Anthology
* This is Chicago (1952)
Memoirs
* Good-bye, Union Square: A Writer's Memoir of the Thirties (1970)
Articles
*
Dial
* Midland
*
Prairie Schooner
''Prairie Schooner'' is a literary magazine published quarterly at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln with the cooperation of UNL's English Department and the University of Nebraska Press. It is based in Lincoln, Nebraska and was first publish ...
* Menorah Journal
Pagany*
American Mercury
''The American Mercury'' was an American magazine published from 1924Staff (Dec. 31, 1923)"Bichloride of Mercury."''Time''. to 1981. It was founded as the brainchild of H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan. The magazine featured wri ...
*
New Masses
''New Masses'' (1926–1948) was an American Marxist magazine closely associated with the Communist Party USA. It succeeded both ''The Masses'' (1912–1917) and ''The Liberator''. ''New Masses'' was later merged into '' Masses & Mainstream'' (19 ...
*
Harper'sarticles
*
Atlantic Monthly
''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.
It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...
articles
*
New Yorker
New Yorker or ''variant'' primarily refers to:
* A resident of the State of New York
** Demographics of New York (state)
* A resident of New York City
** List of people from New York City
* ''The New Yorker'', a magazine founded in 1925
* ''The New ...
articles
*
Yale Review
''The Yale Review'' is the oldest literary journal in the United States. It is published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
It was founded in 1819 as ''The Christian Spectator'' to support Evangelicalism. Over time it began to publish more on hi ...
articles
*
Commentary
Commentary or commentaries may refer to:
Publications
* ''Commentary'' (magazine), a U.S. public affairs journal, founded in 1945 and formerly published by the American Jewish Committee
* Caesar's Commentaries (disambiguation), a number of works ...
articles
References
External links
Photo 1 Albert Halper at Willa Cather's gravestone, Jaffrey Center, NH. 1957
Photo 2 Albert Halper at Willa Cather's gravestone, Jaffrey Center, NH. 1957
Encyclopædia Britannica
{{DEFAULTSORT:Halper, Albert
20th-century American novelists
American male novelists
1904 births
1984 deaths
Deaths from leukemia
Proletarian literature
20th-century American male writers