Allen M. Hornblum is a former political organizer, professor, and criminal justice official whose long and varied career has informed his later work as a scholar, author, and documentarian. His books and articles, which usually tackle controversial and long-neglected subjects, run the gamut from organized crime and Soviet espionage to medical ethics and sports.

 

His writing career began with newspaper op-ed pieces and magazine articles on an array of public policy issues, advocating as an organizer for such groups as Americans for Democratic Action and the Philadelphia Unemployment Project. His first book, Acres of Skin, tackled the chilling sights he first witnessed in the Philadelphia Prison System - the exploitation of prisoners as raw material for medical research by a prominent dermatologist and elite university. 

 

Subsequent books would remain in the field of criminal justice and medical ethics. Having worked in the Philadelphia prisons in the 1970s, and later in the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office and Pennsylvania Crime Commission enabled him to develop the relationships to track down the players and explore the history of Philadelphia’s mythic Irish Mob. Confessions of a Second Story Man told the story of the K & A Gang, postwar America’s most brazen and productive burglary ring.

 

Sentenced to Science returned to unethical medical research in a dramatic account of one Black man’s tortured experience as an imprisoned human guinea pig. That was followed with a third book on vulnerable populations as test subjects with Against Their Will (with Judy Newman and Greg Dober), a disturbing history of institutionalized children as cheap and available research material. 

 

Long interested in Depression era Soviet espionage and Cold War history, Hornblum decided to investigate the life of a seemingly innocuous Philadelphia chemist who was actually an accomplished industrial and military spy. The Invisible Harry Gold tells the story of good intentions gone bad, and the man who gave the secrets of the Atomic Bomb to the Soviet Union.

 

Another Philadelphian with outsized global recognition, but long forgotten is tennis champion, Bill Tilden. One of the greatest athletes during America's Golden Age of Sports, Tilden’s slow rise and sudden fall from athletic icon to work farm inmate is told in American Colossus. 

 

Returning to the carceral arena, Hornblum wrote The Klondike Bake-Oven Deaths, a fictional account of one of the worst cases of prison abuse in American history - inmates being cooked alive as punishment for instigating a food strike during the Depression.