Alexander Baron

Joseph Alexander Bernstein (December 4 1917 – December 6 1999) was a Jewish author and screenwriter, best known for his 1963 novel "The Lowlife". He was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and adopted the penname, Alexander Baron. He was raised in the Hackney area of East London, attending Hackney Downs School; and during the 1930s he was a Communist Party activist in London – fighting Fascism in the streets of Whitechapel. He became disillusioned after the Hitler–Stalin Pact, leaving the Communists to become assistant editor of "Tribune".

He served in the Pioneer Corps of the British Army during World War Two, experiencing fierce fighting in Italy and Normandy and used his wartime experiences as the basis for his post war novels. During the war he served in Sicily, Italy, France and Belgium. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/1999/dec/08/guardianobituaries2 "Alexander Baron: His novels of war and London caught the essential decency of mankind"] John Williams December 8 1999, "The Guardian"; accessed 26 August 2008]

Baron's personal papers are held in the archives of the University of Reading. His wartime letters and unpublished memoirs were used by the historian Sean Longden for his book "To the Victor the Spoils", a social history of the British Army between D Day and VE Day. ["To the Victor the Spoils" Sean Longden (Constable and Robinson, 2007). See introduction and index.]

In the 1950s, Baron wrote screenplays for Hollywood, and by the 1960s he had become a regular writer on BBC's "Play for Today", for drama serials like "Poldark", and classic adaptions including "Jane Eyre", "Sense And Sensibility", and "Oliver Twist".

Works

;Novels
*"From The City From The Plough" (1948) a novel about the fictional 5th Battalion of the Wessex Regiment British Army. The novel takes place in the weeks leading up to D Day and during the Normandy campaign. It was widely believed that the battalion was based on units of the 43rd Wessex Division and it's attacks on Hill 112 and Mont Pincon in Normandy.
*"There's no Home" (1950) - On the interaction of wartime British soldiers with the people of Catania, Sicily, focusing on a doomed love affair; two stanzas of Hamish Henderson's "The 51st Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily" serve as the motto
*"Rosie Hogarth" (1951)
*"With Hope, Farewell" (1952)
*"The Human Kind" (1953). This was a collection of short stories that were based upon the author's own wartime experiences. The book was later filmed as "The Victors" (1963), with the British characters changed into Americans in order to attract American audiences.
*"King Dido"
*"The Lowlife" (1963), set in Hackney, is as "a riotous, off-beat novel about gamblers, prostitutes and lay-abouts of London's East End". [Blurb on front cover of the 1964 paperback edition of Alexander Baron "The Lowlife". Fontana Books.]
*"The In-Between Time"
*"Gentle Folk"
*"Franco Is Dying"';Plays
*"The Siege Of Sidney Street"
*"Robbery Under Arms"

References

External links