Overview

James Dalton Trumbo (1905--1976) is widely recognized for his work 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, authors 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 an Academy Award for Roman Holiday (1953). This comprehensive biography provides insights into the many notable people with whom Trumbo worked, including Stanley Kubrick, Otto Preminger, and Kirk Douglas, and offers a fascinating look at the life of one of Hollywood's most prominent screenwriters and his battle against persecution.

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9780813146805

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Reviews

Trumbo's literary skill and immeasurable wit and faithful idealism are highlighted throughout this penetrating biography. [... ] [A]n essential biography and a great book that reflects the time and history in which it is set. -- <i>Red Dirt Report</i></p>

Rarely does a biography so exquisitely balance an artist, his work, and his life as Larry Ceplair's Dalton Trumbo. I thought I knew Trumbo, but this book opened my eyes to the atmosphere of the Hollywood he worked in, the intricacies of the blacklist and the responses to it, and the richness and sometimes contradictory nature of a very complicated man. Ceplair's book had me as hooked as Trumbo's own movies. -- Allison Anders, director and writer of Gas Food Lodging

This is a splendid book, a major accomplishment in the field of American film history and the history of the Left within popular culture. Ceplair and Trumbo examine a major victim of the Hollywood blacklist, with a depth and insight, not to mention exhaustive research, that is unprecedented in biography or autobiography. -- Paul Buhle, coauthor of Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America's Favorite Movies

Author Information

Larry Ceplair is the author of Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical, The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico, and Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History.

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