Alexander Baron

Alexander Baron ( – ) was a British author and screenwriter. He is best known for his highly acclaimed novel about D-Day, ''From the City, from The Plough'' (1948), and his London novel ''The Lowlife'' (1963).

Early life

Baron's father was Barnett Bernstein, a Polish-Jewish immigrant to Britain who settled in the East End of London in 1908 and later worked as a master furrier. Baron was born in Maidenhead, where his mother Fanny (née Levinson) had been evacuated during Zeppelin raids. The family soon returned to London, and Baron was raised in the Hackney district of London. He attended Hackney Downs School.

Politics and wartime

During the 1930s, with his friend Ted Willis, Baron was a leading activist and organiser of the Labour League of Youth (at that time largely under the influence of the Communist Party of Great Britain). He helped establish what became the League's monthly paper, ''Advance''. He campaigned against the fascists in the streets of the East End and edited the Young Communist League (UK) magazine ''Challenge''. Baron became increasingly disillusioned with hard left politics as he spoke to International Brigade fighters returning from the Spanish Civil War. He was for a while a full-time Communist Party worker and according to his memoir
Chapters of Accidents
' had been chosen to go underground in the event that the Party was proscribed during the Second World War, which it initially denounced as 'an imperialist war'. He finally broke with the communists shortly after the war.

Baron served in the Pioneer Corps of the British Army during World War II, and was among the first Allied troops to be landed in Sicily, Italy and on D-Day. Between 1943 and late 1944, he experienced fierce fighting in the Italian campaign, Normandy and in Northern France and Belgium. In 1945 he was transferred as an Instructor to a British Army training camp in Northern Ireland, where he received a serious head injury and was hospitalised for over six months.

Writing career

After the war he became assistant editor of ''Tribune'' and was prominently involved with Unity Theatre. In 1948, he published his first novel ''From the City from the Plough''. At this time, at the behest of his publisher Jonathan Cape, he formally changed his name from Bernstein to Baron. Following the success of his first novel, Baron embarked on a career as a full-time writer. Baron's early novels drew on his own wartime experiences, his difficult postwar transition to civilian life, and his disillusionment with communism. Throughout his literary ''oeuvre'', we find recurrent interest also in London life, politics, class, relations between men and women, and the relationship between the individual and society. In Baron's obituary, the novelist John Williams called him "the greatest British novelist of he Second World Warand among the finest, most underrated, of the postwar period." For further details on Baron's novels, and recent scholarship on his work, see below.

While he continued to write novels, in the 1950s Baron wrote screenplays for Hollywood, and by the 1960s he had become a regular writer on BBC's ''Play for Today''. He wrote several episodes of the ''A Family at War'' series: 'The Breach in the Dyke' (1970), 'Brothers in War' (1970), 'A Lesson in War' (1970), 'Believed Killed' (1971), 'The Lost Ones' (1971), and 'Two Fathers' (1972). Later he became well-known for drama serials like ''Poldark'' and ''A Horseman Riding By'', and in the 1980s for BBC
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