Trumbo

The true story that inspired the major motion picture starring Bryan Cranston and Helen Mirren. Dalton Trumbo was the central figure in the “Hollywood Ten,” the blacklisted and jailed screenwriters. One of several hundred writers, directors, producers, and actors who were deprived of the opportunity to work in the motion picture industry from 1947 to 1960, he was the first to see his name on the screen again. When that happened, it was Exodus, one of the year’s biggest movies. This intriguing biography shows that all his life Trumbo was a radical of the homegrown, independent variety. From his early days in Colorado, where his grandfather was a county sheriff, to Los Angeles, where he organized a bakery strike, to bootlegging, to Hollywood, where he was the highest-paid screenwriter when he was blacklisted (and a man with constant money problems), his life rivaled anything he had written.

Author Biography

Bruce Cook (1932-2003), veteran critic, journalist, and author, wrote this biography with Dalton Trumbo’s full cooperation in 1976. Under the name Bruce Alexander, Cook wrote eleven mystery novels featuring the real-life historical figure Sir John Fielding, magistrate of the Bow Street court during the latter half of the eighteenth Century. Under both names Cook wrote a total of 23 books, both fiction and nonfiction; they include a crime fiction series featuring Los Angeles private detective Chico Cervantes. Cook’s last completed novel, Young Will: The Confessions of William Shakespeare, was published posthumously. Born in Chicago, Bruce Cook lived in Los Angeles and Paris with his wife, the violinist Judith Aller.