Dalton Trumbo.

The first child of Orus and Maud Trumbo, Dalton Trumbo arrived on December 9, 1905 in Montrose, Colorado. He was raised at 1124 Gunnison Avenue in Grand Junction. His father Orus worked in a shoe store, and young Trumbo peddled produce from the family garden and delivered newspapers. At Grand Junction High School class of 1924, he worked as a cub reporter for The Daily Sentinel and captained the debating team to two Western Slope Rhetorical Meet victories.

After his father died of pernicious anemia in 1926, Trumbo became the breadwinner, taking jobs including bootlegging and working the night shift at a bakery for nearly a decade. He attended the University of Colorado Boulder and later the University of Southern California but never completed a degree. During this time he sold short stories to magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue, and his first novel Eclipse 1934 was a thinly veiled portrait of his hometown.

Trumbo signed his first screenwriter contract with Warner Bros in 1935 at $100 per week. He earned his first Oscar nomination for Kitty Foyle 1940 and during World War II wrote patriotic scripts including A Guy Named Joe 1943 and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo 1944. In 1947, as a member of the Hollywood Ten, he was cited for contempt of Congress and served ten months in federal prison.

Blacklisted, Trumbo moved to Mexico and wrote over thirty scripts under pseudonyms such as Robert Rich and Ian McLellan Hunter. His work under the name Robert Rich won the Oscar for Best Story for The Brave One 1956. The blacklist broke in 1960 when Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger publicly credited him for Spartacus and Exodus. He later wrote screenplays for Lonely Are the Brave 1962, Hawaii 1966, and Papillon 1973, in which he also appeared.

Trumbo married Cleo Beth Fincher in 1938 after meeting her at a drive‑in in Los Angeles. They had three children: Nikola born 1939, Christopher born 1940, and Melissa Mitzi. During the blacklist, the family exiled to Mexico City, where Trumbo wrote scripts while chain‑smoking in the bathtub, often with a parrot on his shoulder.

Trumbo consumed six packs of cigarettes a day. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1973. He died of a heart attack on September 10, 1976, in Los Angeles. At his memorial, fellow Hollywood Ten member Ring Lardner Jr. delivered a famously witty eulogy.

Trumbo posthumously received the Oscar for Roman Holiday 1953 in 1993, sixteen years after his death. The University of Colorado Boulder’s Journalism School dedicated the Dalton Trumbo Free Speech Fountain in his honor. He was portrayed by Bryan Cranston in the 2015 film Trumbo, which introduced his story to a new generation. Trumbo is remembered as a leading figure among the Hollywood Ten, a writer who defied the blacklist and helped dismantle it, securing his place as a champion of free speech in American cinema.