While a little over 100,000 American military personnel and civilians died in the war, the total number of deaths from all nations was about 40 million, meaning the war had an even more significant impact on Europe. The war pitted the Central Powers (including Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire) against the Allies (including France, the UK, Italy, Russia, and Japan), with the United States joining in 1917 on the side of the Allies.

World War I, known as the Great War at the time, started in 1914 and became the most destructive war in history up until that point, largely due to new technology that led to deadlier weaponry, including tanks, toxic gas, machine guns, and aircraft. Trumbo’s life story received renewed attention after the release of the biopic Trumbo in 2015 and the release of blacklist-era Hollywood parody Hail, Caesar! in 2016.ĭalton Trumbo speculated that Johnny Got His Gun might have been the last novel about World War I to be written before World War II. Trumbo continued to write screenplays without receiving official credit and eventually helped end the blacklist in the early 1960s. Trumbo’s involvement with the American Communist Party got him placed on Hollywood’s “blacklist” of banned screenwriters after Trumbo refused to testify in front of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. While today Trumbo is perhaps most famous as the screenwriter for films like Roman Holiday and Spartacus, he began his career writing for magazines, later publishing his first novel, Eclipse, in 1935. While going to college in Los Angeles, he wrote 88 short stories, six novels, and several movie reviews, all of which were rejected. Like Joe, the protagonist of Trumbo’s anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, Trumbo also lost his father at an early age and moved to Los Angeles to work the night shift at a bakery. Dalton Trumbo was born and grew up in Colorado.

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