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    A Study Guide for Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun"
    A Study Guide for Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun"
    A Study Guide for Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun"
    Ebook47 pages34 minutes

    A Study Guide for Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535826624
    A Study Guide for Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun" - Gale

      13

      Johnny Got His Gun

      Dalton Trumbo

      1939

      Introduction

      Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, the story of a badly wounded World War I soldier, is one of the most enduring antiwar novels in American literature. Although Trumbo was a burgeoning literary figure at the time of the book's publication in 1939, he would become famous not as a novelist but as a Hollywood screenwriter. Trumbo's cinematic inclinations can be detected in certain stylistic aspects of Johnny Got His Gun, as with the montage scene featuring lines like Johnny get your gun get your gun get your gun from George M. Cohan's war anthem Over There. However, the novel is far more challenging than the average film.

      As the book opens, Joe Bonham is laid up in a hospital and badly wounded, after an incoming shell exploded when he dove to take cover in a trench. The question is, how wounded is he? As the chapters progress, the answer unravels through Joe's intermittent dreams and memories. The next question is, how will he respond?

      The book greatly impressed critics upon its publication, the notable timing of which was not entirely a coincidence: as Nazi Germany roiled and war seemed imminent in the late 1930s, Trumbo sought to finish and publish his novel in time for its antiwar statement to be relevant; it came out within a week after Germany invaded Poland and started World War II. The book was subsequently serialized in the American Communist Party's newspaper, the Daily Worker.

      The novel won one of the early National Book Awards, then presented by the American Booksellers' Association, for Most Original Book of 1939.

      Although most of Johnny Got His Gun takes place away from the battlefield, a number of grievous injuries to soldiers are described in graphic detail.

      Author Biography

      James Dalton Trumbo was born in Montrose, Colorado, on December 9, 1905, and raised in Grand Junction by his avid home-farmer father, Orus, and Christian Scientist mother, Maud. Some of the details of his early life would find their way into Johnny Got His Gun; to begin with, the book's Shale City is acknowledged to be a stand-in for Grand Junction, Trumbo had two younger sisters named Catherine and Elizabeth, and as a youth he enjoyed camping trips in the wilderness with his father.

      In high school, Trumbo became the successful captain of the debate team and president of a couple of other clubs, all while being ambitiously devoted to his job as cub reporter for the Grand Junction Sentinel. The family moved to Los Angeles while Trumbo was finishing what proved to be his only year at the University of Colorado; not long after, Orus became seriously ill. Maud's religion led her to decline to seek medical treatment for her husband. Orus passed away painfully at home, but it turned out his pernicious anemia was at the time untreatable. After his father's

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