Ted Allan

Ted Allan (January 26, 1916 – June 29, 1995) was a Jewish Canadian writer, several of whose books were made into motion pictures.

Ted Allan was born in Montreal as Alan Herman. In the early 1930s returning he worked as a Montreal-based journalist for the Communist Party of Canada's newspaper, The Clarion. He adopted the name Ted Allan so that he could infiltrate a fascist organization and write an exposé, and subsequently kept the pseudonym. In 1936, he met and became friends with Norman Bethune. The next year, Allan joined the Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion to fight against fascism in Spanish Civil War and met up with Bethune again.

In 1952 Allan and Sydney Gordon published Bethune's biography, The Scalpel, The Sword. He fought for many years to have a film made about Bethune; it was finally accomplished in the early 1990s. In 1939 he published This Time a Better Earth about the Spanish Civil War (New York 1939.)

Allan left the Labor-Progressive Party, as it was known at the time, in 1957 when the party split following a party crisis fomented by Khrushchev's Secret Speech, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and revelations of state supported anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.

In 1976, Allan received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) for his story that became the screenplay for the movie Lies My Father Told Me. He won the Stephen Leacock Award in 1985 for Love Is a Long Shot.

He also published the children's book Willie the Squowse, and published short stories in Harper's and The New Yorker.

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