"[2] A one-time member of the Communist Party, after he and his wife Marguerite Roberts refused to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, they were blacklisted and unable to work in Hollywood for nearly a decade.
Julian Shapiro was born in Harlem, New York to a first-generation American mother and Russian immigrant father, who was a lawyer.
After graduating from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, Shapiro studied law at Fordham University, obtaining his degree in 1929.
[3] Shapiro then wrote for avant-garde magazines (The New Review, Tambour, Pagany, Contact) and gave up working as a lawyer.
[5] When he was close to publishing his second book, The Old Man's Place, his friend West (born Weinstein), suggested he change his name to one less identifiably Jewish.
The novel tells of a small-town shop owner who rapes a young African-American woman, beats to death a Native American, and tries to get rid of the only Jew in the town.
Though he sometimes was compared to the young John Dos Passos, Sanford's work was so original that it confounded critics and their categories -- probably to his professional detriment.
[10]Sanford left three unpublished books: A Dinner of Herbs, about the women he knew; A Citizen of No Mean City, about his father; and Little Sister Spoken For, about the first five years of his marriage with Marguerite Roberts.
He also contributed to a book about Martin Berkeley, the informer who gave more than 150 names (including the Sanfords) to the inquiry committee in 1951.
A psychology teacher at the California State University, Fullerton, he said that Sanford, in his story "Judas and Inquiry" for the book on Berkeley, explored the mind of a man who would inform on others.