23-05-2016, 03:13 PM
Peter Lemkin Wrote:Do I understand that your father and family moved to France after he was blacklisted in the USA? Did he move back to the USA at the end of his life or remain in France?
That information is available on the Biography page of the website I've set up about him. http://thomasgbuchanan.com/biography/
Here are the relevant parts:
Quote:Buchanan's last employment in the United States was as a computer engineer (programmer). In those days, computers were not portable, they filled entire rooms. When the company was about to get a new model of computer, training for it required that he visit another facility that had the same model while they waited for theirs. Because the facility conducted work for the Pentagon, there would be a security clearance check routine for anyone not involved in what was considered to be "subversive" affiliations, but it would spell the end of yet another job for a communist, even though he had by that time left the Communist Party.
Buchanan moved to France in 1961 and worked as a computer programmer for a number of companies over the years
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Tom Buchanan married his first wife in 1941. She and their 5 children joined him in France in 1963. He met his second wife a few years later and they remained together until his death. He died in Paris in 1988, of multiple myeloma.
In other words: he didn't move to France immediately after losing his reporter job in 1948 and getting blacklisted. Instead, he worked at a string of other jobs for another 13 years. By 1961 he had contacts in France through the publishing of his novel The Unicorn (published there in 1959 and in the US in 1960), so when this security check situation arose at his programming job, France was the obvious place to move to as an alternative to trying to find a new job in the US while the FBI was still making that difficult. I and the rest of our family didn't join him in France until 2 years later, and my parents separated 2 years after that but we all remained in France at that time. My father visited the States several times after moving to France, but never lived there again. He brought his elderly mother over to France to live with him and his second wife for the last few years of his mother's life.
Peter Lemkin Wrote:Again, thanks for your input on your father. I for one hope his seminal book can be reprinted with a new introduction explaining some of what you mention. In e-book format might be good too.
Yes, I'm hoping to eventually publish certain of his works -- some for the first time and others re-printed in updated versions with commentary or editing. E-books are one of the formats I expect to use. I have to wait until I receive copies of the manuscripts from my stepmother through my siblings, who are still in France, where those documents are as well. I, on the other hand, moved back to North America in my twenties and now live in Canada.