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.<br /> He served in the Pioneer Corps of the British Army during World War II , 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.<br /> 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 His wartime letters and unpublished memoirs were used by the historian Sean Longden for his book To the Victor the Spoils, a social history of the British Army between D Day and VE Day.<br /> 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.<br /> Note that the Infotext-published anti-Semitic and similar rants listed below are not by the same author.