Ring Lardner, Jr.'s memoir is a pilgrimage through the American century.
The son of an immensely popular and influential American writer, Lardner
grew up swaddled in material and cultural privilege. After a memorable
visit to Moscow in 1934, he worked as a reporter in New York before
leaving for Hollywood where he served a bizarre apprenticeship with
David O. Selznick, and won, at the age of 28, an Academy Award for the
classic film, Woman of the Year, the first on-screen pairing of
Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.
In "irresistibly readable" pages (New Yorker), peopled by a cast
including Carole Lombard, Louis B. Mayer, Dalton Trumbo, Marlene
Dietrich, Otto Preminger, Darryl F. Zanuck, Bertolt Brecht, Bert Lahr,
Robert Altman, and Muhammad Ali, Lardner recalls the strange existence
of a contract screenwriter in the vanished age of the studio system--an
existence made stranger by membership in the Hollywood branch of the
American Communist Party.
Lardner retraces the path that led him to a memorable confrontation with
the House Un-American Activities Committee and thence to Federal prison
and life on the Hollywood blacklist. One of the lucky few who were able
to resume their careers, Lardner won his second Oscar for the screenplay
to M.A.S.H. in 1970.