15 Facts About Millen Brand

Millen Brand's father was a freelance electrician and his mother was a nurse.

Millen Brand's maternal grandfather was a carpenter and his paternal grandfather was a farmer.

Millen Brand's father bought a farm in 1906, which led to his cessation of attendance in school, because he preferred doing farm chores.

Millen Brand resided in Greenwich Village and on a small farm in Bally, Pennsylvania.

Millen Brand married twice; first to Pauline Leader, a poet noted for her memoir about growing up deaf, And No Birds Sing, and then to Helen Mendelssohn.

Millen Brand had three children by his first marriage and one by his second.

Millen Brand's house became the setting for the New York portion of that book and two of its residents were later actors who appeared in its stage adaptation.

Neel, who painted a portrait of Millen Brand, was the basis of the character Rose Hallis in Millen Brand's 1959 novel Some Love, Some Hunger.

In 1937, Millen Brand wrote his first novel, The Outward Room.

In 1948 Millen Brand was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing for The Snake Pit, an adaptation of Mary Jane Ward's novel, which like his novel, The Outward Room, involved confinement in a mental health institution.

Millen Brand was fascinated by Rosen's eccentric version of psychoanalysis, which was later criticized because of patient deaths, leading to Rosen surrendering his medical licence.

Blacklisted from work in film and theater, Millen Brand was an editor at Crown Publishers for about twenty years, starting in the early 1950s, where he edited works by Indian social-realist novelist Bhabani Bhattacharya.

Millen Brand taught in the writing programs at the University of New Hampshire and New York University.

Millen Brand supported various anti-fascist causes, beginning in the 1930s and was later active in the peace movement.

In 1953, Millen Brand was required to appear before the US Senate Investigations subcommittee, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy, at which appearance he refused to testify against his colleagues in the League of American Writers, citing the Fifth Amendment.