[4][5] Born into an affluent Jewish family,[6] in Brooklyn, New York, Maltz was educated at Columbia University, where he was a member of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity and the class of 1930,[7][8] and the Yale School of Drama.

He was accused of "Browderism" and in order to retain his good standing with the party he had to humiliate himself by publishing in the Daily Worker a rebuttal of his own article.

John Sbardellati of the University of Waterloo argued in the journal Cold War History that "by reigning [sic] in Albert Maltz, the Party rejected its earlier, more accommodating approach to popular culture, and in doing so, unwittingly forfeited a large measure of its cultural influence" and that this shift contributed to the rapid decline of "social problem films" that had emerged early in the post-war era (p. 489).

[5] Writing in the Journal of American Studies, Colin Burnett argues, "The immediate attacks on Maltz by critics like Mike Gold were motivated primarily by the view that a properly Marxist aesthetics must follow the Leninist–Zhdanovite theory of 'art as a weapon'," though Burnett proposes "a reexamination of the 'para-Marxist' theory of art [Maltz] developed to clarify the role of leftist criticism and the 'citizen writer' ... in light of debates about art and literature in the journal New Masses (1926–48), as well as in international Marxist aesthetics.

During this period, he also received two Academy Awards for documentary or documentary-style films:[24] the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1942 for The Defeat of German Armies Near Moscow and a special Oscar in 1945 for The House I Live In, an 11-minute film with singer-actor Frank Sinatra opposing anti-Semitism through an incident of young bullies chasing a Jewish boy, prompting Sinatra to speak and sing about why such behavior is wrong.

In 1947 Maltz became one of the Hollywood Ten, who refused to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee about their Communist Party membership.

[29] Like the others, Maltz was blacklisted by studio executives, beginning with an announcement on November 27, 1947, from the president of the Motion Picture Association of America that fifty of the field's top executives had met for two days and decided to drop all ten men from their payrolls, to hire "no known Communists" in future, and to refuse to rehire any of the blacklisted men "until he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declared under oath that he is not a Communist.

A 1949 Frank X. Tolbert review of Maltz's The Journey of Simon McKeever notes that the author's notoriety likely will lead the book to be "read keenly and even X-rayed to see if it might furnish a clue to the question the writer wouldn't answer.

"[34] Praising the novel as a "beautiful" novel and "an eloquent criticism of the way we treat our old people" in the form of a "stream of consciousness story about a few days in the life of a 73-year-old arthritic in a rest home on a $60 pension," a man who "has made good wages all his life" but is "too generous to have saved any money," living in an old-age home Tolbert describes as "like something Charles Dickens would have cooked up if he were a twentieth-century author"—Tolbert concludes that "if [this book] is 'un-American' in its philosophy, then so are the doctrines of old Doc Townsend and most of the other pension planners.

"[35] In the same article, Ward Bond disparaged Sinatra and others who employed blacklisted writers as "members of the recent trend of what might be called a 'Hire the Commies' Club.

"[35] Sinatra initially parried attempts to persuade him to fire Maltz, stating that the writer was hired "because he was the best man for the job—it had nothing to do with his politics",[35] but in the end Sinatra was pressured into dismissing Maltz from the project,[1] with columnist Dorothy Kilgallen crediting chiefly the intervention of Kennedy's father, Joe—"unquestionably anti-Communist, Dad Kennedy would have invited Frank to jump off the Jack Kennedy presidential bandwagon if he hadn't unloaded Maltz"—[36] although she also noted that Col. Parker "was on the verge of pulling Elvis off the upcoming Sinatra spectacular if there was any chance of guilt by association.

"[38] Maltz was finally employed again on Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), which was a vehicle for the popular actors Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine.

He worked on additional screenwriting projects in his later years, not all of which came to fruition; a 1972 article on Martin Rackin notes his intention to film a Modigliani biography he co-wrote with Maltz,[39] while a 1978 Henry Fonda profile indicates his plans to revive a script of Maltz's The Journey of Simon McKeever, previously set to star Walter Huston but shelved due to the blacklist, then revived for Spencer Tracy but abandoned when the star died before shooting began.

"[45] In his later years, Maltz reached out to others outside the United States, once offering to take any royalties owed him by the Soviet Union and give them to Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to alleviate the dire conditions then being imposed on him by the USSR.

[1][2][47] In an interview given a few weeks after Maltz's death, actor Kirk Douglas—who claimed to have broken the blacklist by publicly hiring Trumbo in 1959 to improve the Spartacus script—said of the 10, "I felt badly about those people.