The Disunited States

Influential French novelist, screenwriter, pioneer in literary genre and Oscar nominee Vladimir Pozner came to the United States in the 1930s. He found the nation and its people in a state of profound material and spiritual crisis, and took it upon himself to chronicle the life of the worker, the striker, the politician, the starlet, the gangster, the everyman; to document the bitter, violent racism tearing our society asunder, the overwhelming despair permeating everyday life, and the unyielding human struggle against all that. Pozner writes about America and Americans with the searing criticism and deep compassion of an outsider who loves the country and its people far too much to render anything less than a brutally honest portrayal. Recalling Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Pozner shatters the rules of reportage to create a complete enduring and profound portrait.

VLADIMIR POZNER (1905–1992) was a French writer of Russian descent, whose prestigious career as a novelist took off in the 1930s with the publication of Tolstoï est Mort (Tolstoy is Dead) and Les mors aux dents (published in English as Bloody Baron: The Story of Ungern-Sternberg). A militant antifascist who took refuge in the U.S. during the war, Pozner worked as a Hollywood screenwriter, eventually befriending Bertolt Brecht and Charlie Chaplin, and writing the Oscar-winning script for The Dark Mirror, a film noir crime drama. Backpacker, raconteur, and pioneer of literary styles, Pozner dedicated his life to giving a testimony of his times. 

ALISON L. STRAYER is a Canadian writer and translator, author of Jardin et prairie, a novel, and numerous literary essays, articles, and stories. She lives in Paris and recently completed a novel in English.