Dalton Trumbo Biography

Fast Facts

• Recipient of a National Book Award in 1939 for "Johnny Got His Gun"
• Wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for 1956's "The Brave One" while blacklisted and would only receive the statuette shortly before his death in 1975 after revealing that he wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym Robert Rich
• Attended the University of Colorado for two years before moving to Los Angeles, where he would continue his studies at the University of Southern California
• Father of filmmaker, screenwriter and blacklist historian Christopher Trumbo who produced the Broadway musical "Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted" based on his father's letters from the 1950s
• Opted to donate his body to science following his death due to a heart attack at the age of 70
• Quote: "The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil․․․There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides․"
• While working at Warner Brothers in the story department as a reader, he published his first novel in 1935, later turning to the film industry by 1937
• One of the most notable members of the Hollywood Ten, the first group of filmmakers blacklisted for supposed communist dealings during the 1950s
• His critically praised, yet controversial novel Night of the Aurochs was published posthumously in 1979
• Wrote more than 80 short stories and six novels while still attending college, however, none of them were ever published