My years of teaching acting are an honorable footnote to the catastrophic Hollywood blacklist. It began in 1947, when the House sub-Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), chaired by Congressman J. parnell Thomas of New Jersey, subpoenaed nineteen of the most successful Hollywood writers and directors on the suspicion that they were trying to infiltrate Hollywood with communist principles. The first ten witnesses (Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo) vigorously challenged the committee’s right to probe into their personal, social, and political beliefs and,