All for Love by Ring Lardner, Jr.  Published in 1985 by Franklin Watts. Hardcover, with dust jacket. 186 pages.

This copy is SIGNED and INSCRIBED by the author on the half-title page: "To Bill / with best wishes / Ring Lardner Jr."

Condition is quite nice. There are a few slight tears in the edge of the dust jacket as shown. The price is clipped from the dust jacket. The book itself looks new and has no pen/pencil marks, bookplates, library insignia, or similar flaws.

Ringgold Wilmer Lardner Jr. (1915 – 2000) was an American journalist and screenwriter. He won at least two Academy Awards for his work. While still in his twenties, Lardner won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the movie Woman of the Year (1942), the first film to pair Katharine Hepburn with Spencer Tracy. Almost 30 years later, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for M*A*S*H in 1970.

Lardner was blacklisted by the Hollywood film studios during the late 1940s and 1950s after his appearance as an "unfriendly" witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) leading to Lardner's being found guilty of contempt of Congress. In 1947, he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee as one of the "Hollywood Ten," left-leaning writers who were sent to jail for refusing to disclose their political affiliations. When asked by the Committee if he had ever been a member of the Communist Party, the Oscar-winning screenwriter famously said he could answer the question, “But if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.”

Lardner was sentenced to 12 months in federal prison and fined $1,000. Blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, Lardner worked for the next couple of years on the novel The Ecstasy of Owen Muir (1954). Beginning in 1955, Lardner and fellow blacklistee Ian McLellan Hunter, working under pseudonyms, wrote episodes of television series, including The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, and The Buccaneers, for producer Hannah Weinstein, an expatriate American living in England.

The blacklist was lifted for Lardner when producer Martin Ransohoff and director Norman Jewison gave him screen credit for writing The Cincinnati Kid (1965). His later work included M*A*S*H (1970) and The Greatest (1977), for which he re-wrote the original script by Bill Gunn. His final film project was an adaptation of Roger Kahn's book The Boys of Summer.

Lardner is also rumored to have won an Academy Award for a movie he wrote under a pseudonym. Lardner refused to tell which movie it was, saying that it would be unfair to reveal it because the writer who allowed Lardner to use his name as a front was doing him a big favor at the time.

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