Career
Trumbo got his professional start working for Vogue magazine.
In 1934, he became a reader in the story department at Warner Brothers studio.
He wrote his first published novel, Eclipse (1935), about a town and its people, in the social realist style, drawing on his years in Grand Junction. The book was controversial in Grand Junction and many people were unhappy with his portrayal. Years after his death, he would be honored with a statue in front of the Avalon Theater on Main Street, where he was depicted writing a screenplay in a bathtub.
He started in movies in 1937 and became one of Hollywood's highest paid writers at about $4000 per week while on assignment, as much as $80,000 in one year. He worked on such films as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), and Kitty Foyle (1940), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay.
Trumbo's 1939 anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, won one of the early National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1939. It was inspired by an article Trumbo read several years earlier, concerning the Prince of Wales hospital visit to a Canadian soldier who had lost all his limbs in World War I.
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