In 1943, Sturz and Lomax rented an apartment in
Gramercy Park. Sturz worked for the
Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, run by
Nelson A. Rockefeller, and then for the OWI and the
BBC Home Service as a
script writer earning $3,600 ($67,400 in 2025 dollars). Sturz wrote three "ballad operas," a format innovated by Lomax in his prior work at the OWI. These productions combined folk singing with acting and storytelling. They were produced in the US and distributed through British radio networks, especially the BBC. This was part of the US WWII effort to lift morale of overseas troops and increase international support for fighting fascism. •
The Man Who Went to War. Written by
Langston Hughes and produced by the BBC's
Douglas Bridson in 1943. Sturz and Lomax selected the folk songs. •
The Martins and the Coys. Sturz wrote the script (as Elizabeth Lyttleton). It was published as a five-disc BBC Records Album in 1944 and included:
acting and singing by Will Geer, Woody Guthrie (in his only documented acting role), Burl Ives, Lily May Ledford, Pete Seeger, Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, and Hally Wood. •
The Chisholm Trail. Sturz (credited as Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold) wrote the script. It included performances by Woody Guthrie and Burl Ives, and was broadcast by the BBC in Britain in February 1945. By November 1944, Sturz and Lomax were again living in the Village, and Sturz gave birth to their daughter,
Anna Lyttleton Lomax. With Lomax now in the army, the family relied on Sturz's income, so she swiftly returned to work. With the end of
WWII, the OWI was closed in September 1945 along with Sturz's employment there. Sturz continued as a script writer by adapting novels for radio, credited as Elizabeth Lomax: •
John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven, 1946. •
Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River, 1947, for Radioteatro de America in two half-hour sequences. • Thomas Wolfe's
Look Homeward, Angel, retitled
Farewell to Altamont, 1947, for
Voice of America in 14 episodes. In 1950, Sturz wrote the libretto for ''O'Higgins of Chile'' by
Henry Cowell (credited as Elizabeth Harald [Lomax]), but it was never performed. In 1958 Sturz (as Elizabeth Lyttleton) published a book with
Herb Sturz:
Reapers of the Storm. Their research was conducted while living in
Malaga, Spain for 14 months in 1955 to 1956. They told authorities they were working on a complimentary piece about the
Franco regime. In fact, they intended to reveal the painful living conditions most people were experiencing then. They interviewed local fishermen and gave them small notebooks to use as diaries. The team smuggled their materials out of Spain to London in 1956 where they wrote their book. It was reviewed by
Time magazine, which said the authors smuggled the book out of Spain into
Gibraltar, and feared reprisal from Spanish agents even though they had moved to New Jersey. A
New York Times review said: As a novel it stands on its own a somber, bitter and vivid painting of life as it is lived by millions of unhappy and frustrated Spaniards today. One gets a true sense of the grinding poverty, the religiosity mixed with hatred of the clergy, the petty cruelty and corruption of the officials and the few well-to-do. But there is also the dignity, patience and courage of the Spaniard who lives at the lowest economic and social level, and a majority do. The collaboration between the two authors (a husband and wife team) is so smoothly achieved that there is no possible way of detecting that a man and woman have written it together except for the dust jacket. Sturz regularly wrote poems published in the
Saturday Review of Literature, and she received a
Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship award to write a novel. Sturz also made contributions to the New York Times as a book reviewer. For example, Sturz reviewed
The Girls in the Gang in 1984. Sturz's book
Widening Circles was published in 1985. It was about the Argus Community, which Sturz founded and directed. == Argus Community ==