Man on a Road and Other Stories

Maltz ranks among the best of American short-story writers, both in his versatility and in the sheer power of his prose. The stories selected for this volume are considered classics and have been translated into more than 20 languages. All display Maltz at his most provocative.

The titular story in this collection, ‘Man on a Road’ – which famously led to the 1936 congressional hearings that exposed the worst industrial disaster in American history – is a snapshot of appalling capitalist exploitation from the perspective of a walking-dead miner slowly suffocating from silicosis. ‘The Happiest Man on Earth’, winner of the 1938 O. Henry Award, is about a man who, desperate to feed his family and regain his dignity, embarks on a long journey on foot in his quest for a job, while ‘The Way Things Are’ renders the terrors of the Jim Crow South with unflinching realism, foreshadowing the aesthetics and politics of the civil-rights movement.

Albert Maltz, one of the “Hollywood Ten” of the McCarthy era, spent ten months in prison and twenty years on the blacklist as a banned artist forced to write under a pseudonym. With this collection of stories, spanning forty years of his career and including previously uncollected works, his long-silenced voice returns, re-establishing him as a master of hard-hitting but compassionate short fiction.