The Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers named him as an accomplice in 1949, and Lieber fled first to Mexico and then Poland not long after Alger Hiss's conviction in 1950.
[4] Lieber's father served as a typesetter for the Yiddish social-democratic newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward, suggesting that one parent (if not both) was secularist.
"[6] According to one writer (and client), Lieber's client list included Louis Adamic, Erskine Caldwell, Katherine Anne Porter, John Cheever, Josephine Herbst, Albert Maltz, John O'Hara, Albert Halper, James Farrell, Nathanael West, Maxim Gorky, Theodore Dreiser, and Langston Hughes.
[7][8] Other clients included Thomas Wolfe,[9] Allen Tate,[5] Saul Bellow,[10] Carson McCullers,[11] Claude McKay,[12] Otto Katz (as "Andre Simon") and Egon Kisch,[13][14] Carey McWilliams and Robert Coates,[1] and Alma Mailman (wife first of James Agee and then Bodo Uhse) and Anna Seghers and Ludwig Renn,[14] John Wexley,[15] E. P. O'Donnell,[16] Walker Winslow,[17] and Tom Kromer.
[19] The New York Public Library may have the most complete list (with years represented): A Lieber family source adds these further clients: Joseph Milton Bernstein, Whittaker Chambers, Havelock Ellis, Albert Malkin, Lewis Mumford, Arthur Simmons, and Richard Wright; and possibly Maurice Halperin, Lillian Hellman, and Leon Trotsky.
[23][24] Other authors with whom she dealt include: Alvah Bessie, Daniel Fuchs, David de Jong, and Nancy Hale.
Later, when Chambers wanted to let Peters & Co. know about his life preserver (see Pumpkin Papers), he contacted Lieber to relay his message.
[26][27] While the London operation was getting under way (it would eventually fall through), Chambers asked Lieber to cooperate with fellow underground operator John Loomis Sherman (under the alias "Charles Francis Chase" and Chambers as "Lloyd Cantwell") in establishing the American Feature Writers' Syndicate.
According to Chambers' testimony: Lieber went among various feature syndicates and various newspapers and tried to get various interests or sales ... and Sherman went to work in Lieber's office, had a desk there, and his name was written on the door and I think some stationery was got out and deposits were made, I think, in the Chemical Bank in New York in the name of the syndicate.
[1]In 1949, J. Peters left the United States at his own volition (ahead of near-certain deportation) for Hungary, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Shortly thereafter, Noel Field (like Hiss not only as an employee of the U.S. Department of State, but one named by Chambers as part of his spy ring) fled from Switzerland to Poland (behind the Iron Curtain).
On June 13, 1950, Lieber appeared with lawyer Milton H. Friedman (brother-in-law of New York State Justice Philip M. Halpern[29]) before HUAC during executive session with House representatives Francis E. Walter, Burr P. Harrison, and Morgan M. Moulder.
They asked whether he knew Osmond K. Fraenkel or whether he had ever contributed to a publication (probably Freies Deutschland) by Anna Seghers in Mexico.
During testimony, Lieber listed three by name of some 30 clients: Erskine Caldwell, Carey McWilliams, and Robert Coates.
Although Esther and I had not known any of them personally in the United States, they quickly accepted us into what was to become a community of some dozen U.S. Communists in Poland ... Max, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had been a literary agent, whose clients included, among others, Whittaker Chambers, of Pumpkin Papers fame ...
In the late 1970s, Lieber gave a series of interviews to historian Allen Weinstein, who then was working on his book, "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case."
Lieber's flight abroad in 1951, following Peters, Field, and others, left the U. S. Government with few witnesses to corroborate Chambers' testimony about Hiss.
Lieber told HUAC, "Prior to that I had edited a book, an anthology of short stories, which I am happy to say is in the Library of Congress.