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John Sanford

John Sanford (1904 - March 6, 2003) was an American author. Born Julian Lawrence Shapiro in Harlem, New York City, he was a childhood friend of author Nathanael West. Young Julian studied law at Fordham University, but when West told him that he was writing a book, Julian decided that that was what he wanted to do with his life.

He and West moved to Hollywood together, and Julian Shapiro changed his name to John Sanford because of his concerns over anti-Semitism. He had stories published in European literary journals, and in 1933 wrote his first novel, The Water Wheel.

In 1936, Sanford signed a writing contract with Paramount Studios. It was there that he met fellow writer Marguerite Roberts, and the two married two years later. They collaborated on the film Honky Tonk in 1941. Soon afterwards, Sanford was offered a writing contract by MGM, but Roberts urged him to stop writing movie and to concentrate on writing books, which he did.

Sanford was a member of the Communist Party, and his wife Roberts accompanied him to a few Party meetings, but she never devoted herself to the cause as he had, although she did officially joined the Party. This cost the couple in the 1950s, when they were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. They were banned by Hollywood until, ironically, 1969, when Roberts co-wrote True Grit, starring anti-Communist actor John Wayne.

In 1964, Sanford wrote the novel Every Island Fled Away, but it was his work The People From Heaven which has been called his master work. The story of a racist in a small town who rapes an African American woman, beats a Native American and tries to drive the only Jew out of town, it was attacked by Sanford's fellow Communists as "antisocial", but fellow author William Carlos Williams (with whom Sanford has been compared) called it "the most important book published here in the last 20 years."

Sanford eventually turned from fiction to write history and biography. But his works were distinctive, in that they tended to be made up of small vignettes, instead of broad chapters and themes. His A More Goodly Country, a history of the United States, consists of more than 200 vignettes as seen through the eyes of such participants as Leif Ericsson, Christopher Columbus, Henry David Thoreau, Pocahontas, Stephen Crane, Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. It took him three years to complete. It was turned down by 247 publishers, before finally being published. It was dedicated to Williams.

Marguerite Roberts died in 1989, and the last few years of Sanford's life were largely dedicated to writing about his relationship with his wife. He continued to write until a month before his death, due to failing eyesight.

Sanford published nine novels, five works he called "creative interpretations of history" and 10 volumes of autobiography and memoirs, including the five-book sequence, Scenes From the Life of an American Jew. Four more unpublished works were discovered among his effects.

An abbreviated Biblography

An excerpt from Sanford's Pearl Harbor segment of A More Goodly Country:
This time, the air was stiff with sound, and if God had chosen to speak, He'd've found no room for His radiant waves among the waves already there. Adore and be still! He might've said, but only other planets would've heard. The earth was listening to recipes, to longing sung and played, to the scores made in games; it was also listening to the traffic of ciphered signals to and from Japan, but that was merely noise behind eulogies of oleo, spiels for gasoline. There was wind in the east, and coming on the wind was rain, but no sign of these could be seen as yet -- the sky was still clear, and it might stay fine all day.

John Sanford was also the real name of African-American comedian Redd Foxx