Henry Alsberg  Henry Garfield Alsberg (Sep. 21, 1881Nov. 1, 1970) was an American journalist and writer who served as the founding director of the Federal Writers' Project. A lawyer by training, he was a foreign correspondent during the Russian Revolution, secretary to the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and an influential volunteer for refugee aid efforts. Alsberg was a producer at the Provincetown Playhouse. He spent years traveling through war-torn Europe on behalf of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. After publishing several magazines for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, he was appointed to head the Federal Writers' Project. Fired from the project shortly after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he worked for a short time for the Office of War Information, then joined Hastings House Publishers as an editor. Alsberg was born Sep. 21, 1881, in Manhattan to Meinhard and Bertha Alsberg. Meinhard was born in Arolsen, Germany and immigrated to the United States in 1865 where he married Bertha (born in New York City) and was naturalized in 1876. Henry was the youngest of their four children. Alsberg's parents were secular Jews, his mother being indifferent to religion and his father described as "aggressive in his agnosticism". Alsberg had neither a bris nor a Bar Mitzvah, and only attended a shul once as a child when his grandmother took him to Temple Emanu-El which infuriated his father. Initially home-schooled, Alsberg was fluent in German and French, and spoke some Yiddish and Russian. For his secondary education, he attended Mount Morris Latin School. Alsberg suffered from lifelong digestive problems possibly related to an incident in his teens when his appendix ruptured in the middle of the night. Alsberg waited till morning to tell his family rather than wake them up, and had emergency abdominal surgery. Alsberg, called Hank by friends and family, entered Columbia University at age 15 in 1896, the youngest member of the class of 1900 who called themselves the "Naughty-Naughtians". Alsberg was an editor of the literary magazine "The Morningside", and also contributed poems and short stories. He belonged to the Société Française and the Philharmonic Society (cellist), and participated in baseball, wrestling, and fencing. After graduation, Alsberg enrolled in Columbia Law School, graduating in 1903.