James Dalton Trumbo (December 9, 1905 – September 10, 1976) was an American screenwriter who scripted many award-winning films, including Roman Holiday (1953), Exodus, Spartacus (both 1960), and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944).

[6][7] When he was given public screen credit for both Exodus and Spartacus in 1960, it marked the beginning of the end of the Hollywood Blacklist for Trumbo and other affected screenwriters.

[11] His paternal immigrant ancestor, a Protestant of Swiss origin named Jacob Trumbo, settled in the colony of Virginia in 1736.

[17] Trumbo began his professional writing career in the early 1930s, when several of his articles and stories were published in mainstream magazines, including McCall's, Vanity Fair, the Hollywood Spectator and The Saturday Evening Post.

Writing in the social realist style, Trumbo drew on his years in Grand Junction to portray a town and its people.

[20] It was inspired by an article Trumbo had read several years earlier: an account of a hospital visit by the Prince of Wales to a Canadian soldier who had lost all his limbs in World War I.

[17] 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 Best Adapted Screenplay.

[25] Shortly after Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Trumbo and his publisher decided to suspend reprinting Johnny Got His Gun until the end of the war.

According to author Kenneth Billingsley, Trumbo had bragged in The Daily Worker that Communist influence in Hollywood had prevented films from being made from anti-Communist books, such as Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar.

[28][29] In October 1947, drawing upon these names, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) summoned Trumbo and nine others to testify for their investigation as to whether Communist agents and sympathizers had surreptitiously planted propaganda in U.S. films.

"[30] The MPAA issued a statement that Trumbo and his compatriots would not be permitted to work in the industry unless they disavowed Communism under oath.

After completing his sentence, Trumbo sold his ranch and moved his family to Mexico City with Hugo Butler and his wife Jean Rouverol, who had also been blacklisted.

[33] Shortly thereafter, actor Kirk Douglas announced Trumbo had written the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's film Spartacus (also 1960), adapted from the 1951 novel by Howard Fast.

[citation needed] The guild finally gave him full credit for the script of the 1953 film Roman Holiday in 2011.

Trumbo directed the 1971 film adaptation of his novel Johnny Got His Gun, starring Timothy Bottoms, Diane Varsi, Jason Robards and Donald Sutherland.

[36] In 1938, Trumbo married Cleo Fincher, who was born in Fresno, California, on July 17, 1916, and had moved with her divorced mother and her brother and sister to Los Angeles.

Martin wrote of her: "Mitzi became my official photographer, and she snapped dozens of rolls of film, all to find the perfect publicity photo.

[44] In 2003, Christopher Trumbo mounted an Off-Broadway play based on his father's letters, called Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted, in which a wide variety of actors played his father during the run, including Nathan Lane, Tim Robbins, Brian Dennehy, Ed Harris, Chris Cooper and Gore Vidal.

[49] In 2016, more than a hundred years after his birth, Trumbo was honored by the installation of a statue of him in front of the Avalon Theater on Main Street in Grand Junction, Colorado, his home town.