Mary C. McCall Jr was hard to faze. Jack Warner once called the screenwriter, who played a leading role in securing a Screen Writers Guild’s (SWG) contract in 1942 and was the union’s first female president, “the meanest bitch in town.” He was being an asshole, but he had a point. McCall was someone who, faced with a tirade by Paramount Pictures executive Y. Frank Freeman, blew cigarette smoke in his face and asked, “Is Y. Frank Freeman a rhetorical question?”

Historian J. E. Smyth’s new biography of McCall is a deeply researched account of not only the remarkable life of an early Hollywood screenwriter and organizer, but of Hollywood itself before and after unionization, a story of particular interest today amid the film industry’s current upheavals over technological change and declining working conditions.

Smyth’s new book, Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter, which draws on material from the archives of Warner Bros., the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Writers Guild Foundation, as well as private collections, goes a long way to rescue McCall from obscurity, a place she landed thanks in large part to the McCarthyist witch hunts that tore through the industry’s writers — and their union — unraveling lives and careers, McCall’s included.