"A biography of the Oscar-winning screenwriter who broke the Hollywood blacklist"--Jacket. In the course of their interviews Dalton Trumbo told Bruce Cook, who was too ""embarrassed"" to ask, that he joined the Communist Party casually in 1943 and drifted away, unaltered (""I changed no beliefs"") in 1948, then rejoined briefly in the mid-1950s--which is just what you might have learned from the New York Times Trumbo obituary. Cook's only equipment...

The successful career of 1940s screenwriter Dalton Trumbo comes to a crushing end when he and other Hollywood figures are blacklisted for their political beliefs. It tells the story of his fight against the U.S. government and studio bosses in a war over words and freedom, which entangled everyone in Hollywood from Hedda Hopper and John Wayne to Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger.