As crippled as it gets : Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1939; 1971)

Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun (1939) has come to be known as one of the strongest pacifist statements in American literature. In 1971 Trumbo returned to the topic with an eponymous film based on his own novel. By that time, however, both the personal situation of the author and the mood in the country had changed, and the nation was divided over the issue of the war in Vietnam. The paper seeks to offer a contrastive analysis of the novel and the film and situate them in their respective personal and social contexts. It examines the manner in which the young Trumbo is interpreted by the older Trumbo and it comments on the reception of both works.