Harold J. Salemson
Harold J. Salemson was an influential film critic and translator, born in 1910 in Chicago, Illinois. He spent part of his youth in France, where he became immersed in the vibrant American expatriate literary and artistic scene of the 1920s. Salemson contributed to various periodicals and co-founded the literary magazine Tambour, which showcased works by notable authors such as Countee Cullen and Jean Cocteau. His writing was characterized by a multicultural perspective, distinguishing him from many of his contemporaries.
In 1930, he moved to Hollywood, where he established a reputation as one of the earliest film critics to recognize cinema as a serious art form. Salemson worked in various roles within the film industry, including publicity and distribution, while navigating the challenges of being blacklisted during the 1940s and 1950s. After World War II, he shifted his focus back to writing and translating, teaching film history later in his career. Salemson spent his final years in New York, continuing to work on translations until his death in 1988. His contributions to literature and film criticism remain significant in understanding the intersections of these fields in the 20th century.
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Harold J. Salemson
Translator
- Born: September 30, 1910
- Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
- Died: August 25, 1988
- Place of death: Glen Cove, New York
Biography
Film critic and translator Harold Jason Salemson was born in 1910 in Chicago, Illinois, to a physician father and a French teacher mother. His family moved to France when he was an adolescent and he became involved with the American expatriate literary and artistic scene in Paris in the 1920’s, contributing reviews and essays to a number of periodicals, including Transition. He also was a founder and publisher of the literary magazine Tambour, which began publication in 1929. In the two years of its existence, Tambour published writing by many prominent authors, including Countee Cullen, Theodore Dreiser, William Carlos Williams, George Bernard Shaw, Andre Gide, and Jean Cocteau.
In contrast to many of the American writers working in Paris in the 1920’s, Salemson’s writing was truly multicultural, rather than expatriate. He was enrolled in French schools for four years after completing grammar school, and he attended the University of Montpellier and the Sorbonne for scattered years throughout the 1920’s, returning to the United States in late 1927 to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison for a single semester. When he went back to Paris after being advised by his professors that his education was sufficient for him to write independently rather than attending college, he began writing literary criticism, both of individual works of art and of the expatriate literary scene itself. He also began translating French-language works into English, and he developed an interest in the literati’s political subculture. He signed the “Revolution of the Word Proclamation,” published in Transition in 1929, and with Transition editors Richard Thoma and Samuel Putnam wrote manifestos and criticism that presage the proletarian literature of the 1930’s.
Salemson moved to Hollywood, California, in 1930, after Tambour went out of business. He was a critic and Hollywood correspondent for the magazine Match (later Paris-Match). The film criticism he wrote during the 1930’s earned him a reputation for being one of the earliest critics to treat motion pictures as a serious art form. While in Hollywood, he worked in various capacities in the film industry, primarily doing publicity work, but he also worked in distribution and financing and wrote film subtitles. He married in 1940, just before he began a five-year tour in the psychological warfare corps of the U.S. Army. After World War II, he continued working in the film industry, serving in executive positions for foreign film distribution companies throughout the 1950’s.
Salemson was blacklisted during the 1940’s and 1950’s, but he managed to continue working in spite of the difficulties he encountered. In the 1960’s, he focused his attention more on his writing and translating, also editing books on film, and in 1975 he began a two-year term teaching film history at Long Island University. The last years of his life were spent in semiretirement, with Salemson working on French translations of works that interested him. He lived with his wife at their New York state residence until his death in 1988.