When he was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951, Abraham Lincoln Polonsky (1911-1999) was labelled "a very dangerous citizen" by Harold Velde, a congressman from Illinois. Lawyer, educator, novelist, labour organizer, radio and television scriptwriter, film director and screenwriter, wartime intelligence operative, and full-time radical romantic, Polonsky was blacklisted in Hollywood for refusing to be an informer. The "New York Times" called his blacklisting the single greatest loss to American film during the McCarthy era, and his expressed admirers include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Warren Beatty, and Harry Belafonte. In this critical and cultural biography of Abraham Polonsky, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner present both a consideration of a remarkable survivor of America's cultural cold war and a study of the Hollywood left.;The Bronx-born son of immigrant parents, Polonsky - in the few years after the end of World War II and just before the blacklist - had one of the most distinguished careers in Hollywood. He wrote two films that established John Garfield's postwar persona, "Body and Soul" (1947), still the standard for boxi