"Ring Lardner, Jr.'s memoir is a pilgrimage through the American century. The son of an immensely popular and influential newspaper columnist and short story writer, Lardner grew up 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. There he served a bizarre apprenticeship with producer David O.

Selznick, winning, at the age of 28, an Academy Award for Woman of the Year, the first on-screen pairing of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.".

"In lively pages, 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 screen-writer 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 MAS*H in 1970."--BOOK JACKET.