Dalton Trumbo

Dalton Trumbo was born and grew up in Colorado. Like Joe, the protagonist of Trumbo’s anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, Trumbo also lost his father at an early age and moved to Los Angeles to work the night shift at a bakery. While going to college in Los Angeles, he wrote 88 short stories, six novels, and several movie reviews, all of which were rejected. While today Trumbo is perhaps most famous as the screenwriter for films like Roman Holiday and Spartacus, he began his career writing for magazines, later publishing his first novel, Eclipse, in 1935. Trumbo’s involvement with the American Communist Party got him placed on Hollywood’s “blacklist” of banned screenwriters after Trumbo refused to testify in front of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Trumbo continued to write screenplays without receiving official credit and eventually helped end the blacklist in the early 1960s. He died in Los Angeles in 1976. Trumbo’s life story received renewed attention after the release of the biopic Trumbo in 2015 and the release of blacklist-era Hollywood parody Hail, Caesar! in 2016.