Despite a long-standing love of film and the darkened theater, I had never given much thought to the Hollywood blacklist era until the 1999 Oscars. The Academy gave a special award to Elia Kazan, the legendary director of On the Waterfront (1954), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and many other films, a man who, by any artistic standard, had contributed greatly to this art form. Outside of the event, cameras caught sight of protesters carrying signs decrying the award. Inside cameras circuited throughout, and you could see and sense the palpable tension as some of the celebrity-laden audience rose to their feet, applauding Mr. Kazan as he walked onstage while some remained seated, stoic, refusing to honor him. These conflicting reactions were based on Kazan’s 1952 testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Nearly fifty years later, so deep were the passions the blacklist aroused, many could still not forgive him. Kazan and many others “named names” of their former comrades in the Communist Party years before. Those named were themselves called before the Committee, and the people who refused to “cooperate” were universally blacklisted, ruining careers and wrecking lives.

The blacklist era (1947–1960) is a complex, difficult subject with tangled roots in the entertainment industry, in labor history and anti-Fascist movements during the thirties, as well as our alliance with Russia during the Second World War. Victor Navasky’s Naming Names (1980) remains, in my opinion, the “bible” on the subject. This Columbia University professor painstakingly synthesized hundreds of interviews into a narrative that sought to explain not simply how an entire industry had so totally succumbed to fear, but why. A professor asks: What happened and why? A novelist asks: What if? A novelist has to condense and distill the historical past into currents that can lift and carry characters through the story.

I began to imagine a character caught in a web of old loyalties, and affections. Roxanne Granville had to be brash but conflicted. She had to be young enough to be reckless, convinced, as the young are, that bold gestures will be rewarded. She needed a past that would resonate, and so I gave her a unique childhood where she was informally tutored by a cadre of marvelous writers. I gave her a profession that would plunge her into the fear and suspicion that hung over Hollywood like red smog. For all her privilege and position, she also needed something that would give her a measure of insecurity. Without the stain upon her cheek, she would be a less interesting character.