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Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo. University Press of Kentucky, 2015.
The fate of famed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and the other members of the Hollywood Ten has been a significant part of Hollywood lore for over a half century. It is a story that Hollywood loves to tell and has often told. Woody Allen gave us The Front in 1968, which, as its title implies, deals with how Trumbo and other writers wrote screenplays under pseudonyms. Irwin Winkler wrote and directed Guilt by Suspicion in 1991, starring Robert DeNiro. We are now in the midst of a major Trumbo and Hollywood Ten revival, which started with the 2015 filming of Trumbo, based on Bruce Cook's 1977 biography. We have also had a hilarious contrarian send-up of Hollywood Communists in the Coen Brothers' film, Hail, Caesar! (2016).
The most significant work in this recent revival is the massive (676 pages) Larry Ceplair/Christopher Trumbo biography of Christopher's father, Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical. Just as Tony Hiss spent much of his life trying to vindicate his father, Alger Hiss, Christopher Trumbo spent much of his trying to vindicate his father. Unfortunately, Christopher died before his major product could be completed. Knowing that he would not live to finish the book, Christopher asked Lawrence Ceplair to complete the project, which turned out to be a good...