Banned Books Week: Dr. Amy McCarthy Sifford - Johnny's Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

Submitted by: Dr. Amy McCarthy Sifford, LPC. Read by: Sheri Borges, Co-Owner Poor Richard's Book Shoppe

Johnny Got His Gun is an anti-war novel written in 1938 (published 1939) by American novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and published by J. B. Lippincott company.
The Federal Government/FBI banned the book because they feared it would hurt the WWII war effort and believed it had an anti-American tone.
Awarded the National Book Award in 1940. Although the novel itself was not initially divisive, Trumbo himself was. Trumbo was aligned with the Communist Party in the US throughout World War II and eventually formally joined the Party in the 1940s. When Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, Trumbo and his publishers suspended reprinting of Johnny Got His Gun because Trumbo feared the subject was inappropriate for the time period; inquiries sent to Trumbo (many concerned that his book was suppressed by "fill in the blank") were turned over to the FBI. In a rather nasty turn of events, the FBI came to investigate Trumbo himself because of his Communist sympathies. In 1947 Trumbo was one of those called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an unfriendly witness. Trumbo refused to testify, was convicted of contempt of court, and was blacklisted in Hollywood (Trumbo covers his decision to suspend printing of Johnny in his introduction to the book, last updated in 1970 with an statistical accounting of war injuries).

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Education

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• Amy McCarthy Sifford
• Johnny Got his Gun
• Poor Richard's Book Shoppe
• Banned Books Week