The young Trumbo went to work in a Los Angeles bakery and supported the family while writing six novels, which were never published. According to his biographer, Bruce Cook, it was while working in the bakery that Trumbo learned about "us and them" in society. The admiration for strong, silent loners that is evident in his work seems to stem from his idealization of his maternal grandfather, Millard Tillery, a county sheriff in Colorado.
In 1930 Trumbo wrote an elegant spoof on bootlegging that was accepted by Frank Crowninshield for Vanity Fair. Nothing that Trumbo lived in Los Angeles, Crowninshield assumed he knew about movies. Trumbo, who knew movies only as a spectator, decided to learn, and soon he was contributing movie reviews and essays to the magazine. In 1934, having ghostwritten a book for a German aristocrat ("I realized later that his house was a nest of Nazis") and written items for the Hollywood Spectator for which he received little pay, he followed a friend's tip and got a job reading for the Warner Bros.
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