Ted Allan

Novelist, playwright, and short-story writer Ted Allan, born Alan Herman in Montreal, began his writing career at age seventeen in the communist newspaper the Daily Clarion and followed with short stories in the left-leaning New Frontier. He fought on the communist side in the Spanish Civil War, during which time he met Canadian physician Norman Bethune, on whom his book The Scalpel, the Sword (1954) was based. Working in Hollywood in the 1950s, Allan was blacklisted due to McCarthyism; he moved to London and wrote for British radio and television for twenty-five years. Upon his return to North America, he collaborated on several movie scripts, including his Lies My Father Told Me, before his death in Toronto.