Richard Bransten

Richard Bransten (February 24, 1906 – November 18, 1955) was an American novelist, screenwriter, and Communist Party member.

Family and background

Bransten was born in San Francisco in 1906. He was born into a wealthy family that had made its fortune in the coffee business. His grandfather was Joseph Brandenstein and his father Charles had been one of the founders of MJB Coffee.[1] In 1929, Bransten married his first wife Louise Rosenberg, the San Francisco heiress to a dried fruit fortune. As Louise Bransten, she was a close contact of Nathan Silvermaster and Grigory Kheifets and was accused of being a Soviet spy.[2]

Political and literary career

Bransten began his career as a novelist and short story writer, writing stories that his wife described as “full of bitterness against the hypocritical rich Jewish society in which he had been brought up.”[3] His first political work, The Fascist Menace in the USA, was published in 1934.[4]

In 1937, Bransten married Ruth McKenney, author of My Sister Eileen. Under the pen name Bruce Minton, Bransten published The Fat Years and the Lean in 1940, a book describing the labor movement from 1918 to 1939. As a result of his political writings, the FBI opened a file on Bransten in April 1941.[5]

During World War II, Bransten assisted Jacob Golos and Silvermaster in passing information from Washington to KGB sources in New York.[6] Silvermaster testified in 1944 that Bransten had been “one of his closest social friends”.[7]

Bransten moved to Hollywood for a short period between 1944 and 1945,[8] where he worked as a screenwriter on the films Margie, San Diego I Love You, and The Trouble with Women. Bransten and McKenney were expelled from the Communist Party in 1946 and accused of “conducting a factional struggle against the party line” according to the New York Times.[9] This was the result of the Branstens' opposition to the 1946 expulsion of Earl Browder from the Communist Party.[10]

Following their break with the Party, Bransten and McKenney moved to Europe, living in Brussels and London. There, Bransten published the humorous British travel guide Here’s England: A Highly Informal Guide.[11]

Disillusioned with the Communist Party, Bransten may have informed on his former friends in the Party, though this is not certain.[12]

He committed suicide on November 18, 1955, with a drug overdose.[1]

Legacy

Bransten was the model for the character Stephen Howard in Christina Stead’s novel I’m Dying Laughing.[13] Stead had been a fellow Communist Party member and had been friends with Bransten and McKenney.

References

  1. ^ a b "Rich. Bransten Dies in London". The San Mateo Times. November 19, 1955. p. 1. Retrieved July 3, 2023.
  2. ^ Herken, Gregg (2003). Brotherhood of the bomb: the tangled lives and loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (1st ed.). New York: Holt. pp. 90–93. ISBN 978-0-8050-6589-3.
  3. ^ Meade, Marion (2010). Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney. Houghton Mifflin. p. 351. ISBN 9780547488677.
  4. ^ Whiting, Cécile (1989). Antifascism in American Art. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 223. ISBN 9780300042597.
  5. ^ “Richard Bransten." FBI file for Richard Bransten, page 3, document no. 100-HQ-80068, April 6, 1951.
  6. ^ Cherny, Robert W. (2017). Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art. University of Illinois Press. p. 139. ISBN 9780252099243.
  7. ^ Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments: Hearing Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-third Congress, Second Session. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1953. p. 2413.
  8. ^ Stead, Christina (2005). Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake. Miegunyah Press. p. 545. ISBN 9780522851731.
  9. ^ "Two Writers Ousted by Communist Party". The New York Times. September 13, 1946. p. 4. Retrieved July 3, 2023.
  10. ^ Pender, Anne (May 2004). "'Scorched earth': Washington and the missing manuscript of Christina Stead's I'm Dying Laughing". Australian Literary Studies. 21 (3).
  11. ^ Law, Michael John (2019). Not Like Home: American Visitors to Britain in the 1950s. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 9780773559561.
  12. ^ Wald, Alan M. (2012). American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War. University of North Carolina Press. p. 305. ISBN 9780807835869.
  13. ^ Doherty, Caitlin (May 5, 2021). "The Comedy of American Communism". New Left Review.