Frederica Sagor Maas

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Frederica Sagor Maas (born Frederica Sagor, July 6, 1900, New York City) is an American playwright, essayist and author, the youngest daughter of Russian immigrants.

[edit] Biography

After studying journalism at the University of Columbia and doing odd jobs as a writer at the New York Globe, she got an engagement at Universal Studios as a story editor, and later a job as a screenwriter at MGM.

In 1925, she helped Clara Bow gain cinematic stardom with the film The Plastic Age. From then on she worked with famous stars of the silent film era such as Norma Shearer, with whom she became an intimate friend, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Barbara Kent and Emil Jannings.

In 1927, she married Ernest Maas. They were together until his death in 1986.

In 1947 she wrote her final screenplay, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, a story about feminism in the late 19th Century.

During the McCarthy Era, the period of intense suspicion in the United States in the 1950s, when the U.S. government was actively countering American Communist Party subversion, its leadership, and others suspected of being Communists or Communist sympathizers, Sagor and her husband were interrogated by the FBI for having subscribed to two Communist publications.

In 1999, at age 99, she published her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood, in which she settled up with Hollywood and the United States government.