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 thier 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.
Larry Ceplair is the author of The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico and Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History.
Christopher Trumbo (1940-2011), the son of Dalton and Cleo Trumbo, was a television writer, screenwriter, and author of the play Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted.
"Ceplair and Trumbo's book is an exhaustive and precisely documented study of the work-cinematic, literary and political-of the screenwriter and Hollywood Ten member. It is an outstanding treatment of Trumbo's political struggle and of the obstacles he faced."-Brian Neve, University of Bath
"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
"The three of us, Jane Fonda, Dalton and I, had walked out of the living room and were standing on his back porch, sort of hearing the garden noises, once in a while glancing at the stars that were tiny pinpoints of light in the warm black night. Jane and I were expounding passionately about the revolution to come when Dalton stopped us and in our silence he very carefully said: "Don't forget to be happy." His voice has echoed in my mind for forty plus years. How many memories, how much disappointment, how much rejection and loss, how many regrets were held hostage in that phrase. I loved him truly in that moment and I so love him still.""-Donald Sutherland
"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
