Dalton Trumbo
Blacklisted Hollywood Radical
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"Trumbo emerges from this well-rounded biography as a larger-than-life figure, not unlike the characters he scripted for the screen." —Publishers Weekly
James Dalton Trumbo is widely recognized as a screenwriter, playwright, and author, but he is also remembered as one of the Hollywood Ten who opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee. Refusing to answer questions about his prior involvement with the Communist Party, Trumbo sacrificed a successful career in Hollywood to stand up for his rights and defend political freedom.
In Dalton Trumbo, Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo present their extensive research on the famed writer, detailing his work; his membership in the Communist Party; his long campaign against censorship during the domestic cold war; his ten-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress; and his thirteen-year struggle to break the blacklist.
The blacklist ended for Trumbo in 1960, when he received screen credits for Exodus and Spartacus. Just before his death, he received a long-delayed Academy Award for The Brave One, and in 1993, he was posthumously given another for Roman Holiday. This comprehensive biography, which includes excerpts of Trumbo's letters, notes, and other writings, also provides insights into the notable people with whom Trumbo worked, including Stanley Kubrick, Otto Preminger, and Kirk Douglas, and a fascinating look at the life of one of Hollywood's most prominent screenwriters and his battle against persecution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of the famous "Hollywood 10" blacklisted for an affiliation with the Communist Party, Trumbo (1905 1976) emerges from this well-rounded biography as a larger-than-life figure, not unlike the characters he scripted for the screen. Finishing a draft that was started but left incomplete by Trumbo's son Christopher, who died in 2011, Ceplair (The Marxist and the Movies) begins with Trumbo's early years as a movie reviewer for the Hollywood Spectator and a reader of scripts and books for Warner Brothers. By 1939, when his critically acclaimed anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun was published, Trumbo had been recognized as one of Hollywood's top screenwriters. Excerpts of his letters, notes, articles, speeches, and pamphlets throughout the book amply testify to his boundless energy and talent. Anti-Communist fervor led to Trumbo's imprisonment in 1950 for contempt of Congress and an official absence from the screen for the next decade. But, as detailed in the book's most fascinating sections, he still managed to win over 60 screen assignments between 1954 and 1960, two of which, Roman Holiday and The Brave One, won Academy Awards. Ceplair resists other writers' tendencies to either lionize Trumbo as a martyr or criticize him as a hypocrite, finally humanizing a celebrity often reduced to a one-dimensional icon of his era. 75 b&w photos.
