Wexley was born in 1907 in
Manhattan, not far from
Central Park. His family was Jewish; he was the nephew of
Maurice Schwartz, the noted
Yiddish actor and founder of the
Yiddish Art Theatre. After attending
New York University, Wexley decided to pursue a career on the stage. He auditioned at the
Neighborhood Playhouse, and was rewarded with a small role in
The Dybbuk. He landed roles in productions such as
Three Sisters and
Twelfth Night, but was also starting to write one-act plays.
Theatre Wexley's first full-length play,
The Last Mile (1930), became one of the most famous prison dramas of the 1930s. The story focuses on "the final hours of a condemned man's life and the prison uprising that follows his execution".
Brooks Atkinson of
The New York Times called it "a taut, searing drama" and "an evening of nerve-racking tension in the theatre". the young, unknown actor
Clark Gable played the Mears role and garnered Hollywood film studio attention.
The Last Mile was adapted for the screen in
1932 and again in
1959. In 1934, he completed
They Shall Not Die, a dramatization of the
Scottsboro case and trials. Brooks Atkinson described it as "a play of terrifying and courageous bluntness of statement". In 1937,
Steel was performed at the
Labor Stage by members of the
International Ladies Garment Workers Union, where it had a successful run in New York and then went on a national tour. In 1945, he wrote
Tears Without Laughter, which depicts
Nazi plots to establish cartels in the U.S. The play was written in the hope that it would attract the husband-wife acting duo of
Alfred Lunt and
Lynn Fontanne. In January 1947, Wexley directed his play
Carrot and Club, about a returning
World War II veteran, at the
Shubert Theatre in
New Haven.
Film In the early 1930s, Wexley was moving back and forth between New York City and Hollywood. In 1937 he signed a seven-year contract with
Warner Bros. and settled in Los Angeles. He wrote or co-wrote multiple screenplays that were made into Hollywood films. These included
Angels with Dirty Faces and
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse in 1938,
Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939,
Hangmen Also Die! in 1943, and
The Long Night in 1947. Among his unproduced work was an original screenplay in 1943 for a film titled
Malta. It was due to be produced by
Joe Pasternak and distributed by
MGM.
Philip Dorn and
Donna Reed were cast to star in it. In the early 1940s, Wexley had written a screenplay about
General Mark W. Clark. The film, titled
Advance Agent to Africa, was warned against by the
State Department and
War Department, apparently due to its accurate descriptions of U.S. Army tactics. The film project was cancelled by
Paramount Pictures in 1943.
Communist links Wexley was named numerous times to the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as a
communist or communist sympathiser. In April 1951, he was identified by
Edward Dmytryk as a member of the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA). In March 1953, film writer David A. Lang testified that Wexley was one of several writers who had attended CPUSA meetings. In May 1953,
Robert Rossen included Wexley on a list of over fifty "Hollywood Reds" supplied to the HUAC, and Wexley was also named by George Beck,
Martin Berkeley,
Bart Lytton, and Paul Benedict Radin. Both Wexley and his wife Katharine were named by their friends
Leo and Pauline Townsend. Wexley was
blacklisted, and some of his previous writings were attacked for being pro-communist. For example, the theatre reviewer of the
NAACP's magazine
The Crisis referred to the play
They Shall Not Die as "propaganda for the Communist party transferred to the stage". However, Patrick McGilligan and Ken Mate reported otherwise after interviewing Wexley in 1983:
Rosenberg case After
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for atomic espionage in June 1953, Wexley became interested in their case. Unable to find work as a screenwriter, he began to research the U.S. government's evidence against the Rosenbergs. He retraced the steps of the trial's key witnesses, in particular,
Harry Gold. In 1955, Wexley published
The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which was one of the first detailed rebuttals of the prosecution's case. Over the next two decades, he followed developments in the Rosenberg story and published a revised edition of his book in 1977. ==Personal life==