Dalton Trumbo letters

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Nathan Lane is now appearing off-Broadway in "Trumbo", which is basically a
dramatic reading of Dalton Trumbo's letters. I was able to locate a copy of
"Additional Dialogue" in the Columbia library--a collection of letters from
1942 to 1962 that presumably much of the play is drawn from.

While Trumbo is best-known for his screenwriting and novels like "Johnnie
Got his Gun", he was also a master of this literary form. This 500+ page
collection is simply amazing. While email is obviously a fairly easy medium
to master, it is another thing altogether to imagine somebody banging out
lengthy letters 2 and 3 times a week to a variety of correspondents high
and low on a Remington-Rand. Trumbo was an obvious master of invective who
loved to dish it out to all sorts of people from redbaiters to businesses
that had gotten on his wrong side, but was always sensitive and supportive
to friends and comrades. What was common to all these letters was a keen
understanding of the art of letter-writing.

I have scanned in 5 letters that show Trumbo at his best and that include
the main categories of correspondents.

1. A letter to the Saturday Review of Literature blasting Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. for calling him and other blacklisted writers "hacks".
Apparently the Saturday Review was a sleazy liberal redbaiting outlet and
Trumbo enjoyed letting them have it. http://www.marxmail.org/trumbo1.htm

2. A letter to his wife Cleo from prison in 1950 where he was serving a
ten-month sentence for contempt of Congress.
http://www.marxmail.org/trumbo2.htm

3. A letter to John Sanford, the heterodox novelist and CP'er whom I
reviewed for Swans a while back.
http://www.marxmail.org/trumbo3.htm

4. A wonderfully sarcastic letter to a bank setting them straight on
overdraft charges. http://www.marxmail.org/trumbo4.htm

5. A letter to Alvah Bessie, another blacklisted screenwriter.
http://www.marxmail.org/trumbo5.htm



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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