John Sanford – författare

''She was small, she was slight, with limber hands and fingers and white and consonant teeth; hazel was the colour of her eyes, and she wore size three shoes on her high-arched feet. There was more, though, more than pigmentation, more than fineness of form and feature: she was the repository of winning ways, as if all the graces had devolved on her…'' Thus did John Sanford write of Marguerite Roberts, the ''Maggie'' of this lyrical and moving memoir. His wife for more than half a century, she was a screen-writer of much distinction and one of the highest-paid in Hollywood. With uncommon generosity and with an unflagging belief in Sanford''s ability, she supported him through the writing of his twenty books, all of them acclaimed by the critics but overlooked by the public. He has been called ''the undiscovered treasure of American literature''.

Written between 1943 and 1946, A Man Without Shoes – an epic novel of the immigrant experience in America – was finally self-published in 1951 after over 30 rejections. As Sanford explained ''in 1947, it was a new kind of cold altogether: McCarthyism, it was called, and hard weather was no longer on the way, -it was here. For A Man Without Shoes, the sixteen seasons of the next four years were all of them winter. During that period, the book was submitted to some thirty publishers, and thirty-some times it was declined.'' The novel was considered too politically radical and leftist for the mainstream publishers at the dawn of the McCarthy era.

In this touching memoir, first published in 2003, novelist John Sanford reflects upon the life of his wife, screenwriter Maggie Roberts (1905-1989). He describes their private domestic life together as well as Maggie's public refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee - a decision that caused her to be blacklisted.