Objective Burma (1945). Blacklisting His career came to a halt in 1947, when he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He refused to deny or confirm involvement in the Communist Party, and in 1950, he became one of the Hollywood Ten being found guilty of Contempt of Congress, for which he was imprisoned for ten months, and blacklisted. After his release from prison, he worked at the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco, running the lights and sound board and frequently introducing performers. Bessie left the Communist Party in the 1950s. In 1957, Bessie wrote a novel fictionalising his experiences with the HUAC, The Un-Americans. He followed this with a non-fiction account of his confrontation with the same organisation, Inquisition in Eden, in which he boasted of inserting pro-Soviet propaganda that was "subversive as all hell" into the film Action in the North Atlantic. Bessie's greatest commercial and critical success came with the satirical novel The Symbol, about the exploitation by the film industry of an unhappy actress who resembles Marilyn Monroe. He wrote another non-fiction book in 1975, Spain Again, which chronicled his experiences as a co-writer and actor in a Spanish movie of the same name (Spain Again, 1969). His screenwriting career was ruined by the blacklisting, and he never returned to Hollywood. Late in his life, however, he was involved in bringing his novel Bread and a Stone to the screen in the feature film Hard Traveling (1986) starring J.E. Freeman and Ellen Geer. The screenplay for the film was written by one of Alvah's two sons, Dan Bessie, who has also spent his career working in the film industry. Dan Bessie has published some of his father's previously unpublished or uncollected works, notably his Spanish Civil War Notebooks (2001). In his family biography Rare Birds: An American Family (University Press of Kentucky, 2001), Dan Bessie notes that Alvah was related to some highly successful entrepreneurs: he was father-in-law of well-known 1960s poster artist Wes Wilson, husband of Alvah's daughter Eva, and a brother-in-law (through his first wife, Mary) of famous advertising executive Leo Burnett. Bessie died in Terra Linda, California, aged 81, of a heart attack. Books Fiction Dwell in the Wilderness (1935) Bread and a Stone (1941) (1957) The Symbol: A Novel (1966) One For My Baby: A Novel (1980) Alvah Bessie's Short Fictions (1982); Introduction by Gabriel Miller. Non-fiction Men In