Dalton Trumbo

American · 1905 to 1976

Born December 9, 1905, in Montrose, Colorado, to Orus Trumbo, a shoe clerk, and Maud Tillery, Dalton Trumbo grew up largely in nearby Grand Junction before the family moved to Los Angeles in 1925 to look for steadier work. His father died the following year, leaving Trumbo, not yet twenty-one, to support his mother and two younger sisters. He took a night shift wrapping bread at a Los Angeles bakery, working nine-hour shifts for the better part of a decade while writing eighty-eight short stories and six novels, every one of them rejected, before he sold his first article to a magazine in 1933 and finally quit the bakery. His fourth novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1939), the interior monologue of a World War I soldier who has lost his arms, legs, and face to a shell blast, won the National Book Award for Most Original Book and became one of the most reprinted antiwar novels of the century. By then Trumbo was also one of Hollywood's highest-paid screenwriters, earning as much as seventy-five thousand dollars a year for scripts including Kitty Foyle (1940) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944). In October 1947 he was one of the Hollywood Ten, screenwriters and directors who refused to answer the House Un-American Activities Committee's questions about Communist Party membership; convicted of contempt of Congress, he served eleven months in a federal penitentiary in 1950. Blacklisted and broke, he moved his family to Mexico and spent a decade writing under other men's names and invented ones, winning an Academy Award for The Brave One (1956) as the fictitious Robert Rich, a prize the Academy could not present because no one came forward to claim it. Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger broke the blacklist in 1960 by crediting him openly on Spartacus and Exodus. Trumbo went on to direct the film adaptation of his own novel in 1971. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on September 10, 1976, at seventy.