A short life of the author
William Goldman (12 August 1931 – 16 November 2018) was an American novelist and screenwriter who was, by any reasonable measure, the most successful practitioner of both crafts working simultaneously in the second half of the twentieth century. He won two Academy Awards for original and adapted screenplay, published over twenty novels, and wrote the definitive books about how Hollywood actually works — all while maintaining that “nobody knows anything,” the single most quoted sentence in the history of the film industry.
Early Life and Early Novels
Goldman was born in Highland Park, Illinois, the son of a businessman. He attended Oberlin College and received a master’s degree from Columbia University. He began his career as a novelist, publishing The Temple of Gold (1957), a coming-of-age story, and Soldier in the Rain (1960), a comic military novel adapted into a 1963 film starring Steve McQueen and Jackie Gleason. Boys and Girls Together (1964), a sprawling novel about young people drawn to New York, was his most ambitious early work.
Goldman’s early novels are competent, emotionally direct, and largely forgotten. They established him as a skilled storyteller but gave little indication of the two masterworks — one a novel, one a screenplay — that would define his career.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Goldman’s original screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — the story of two charming, doomed outlaws (Paul Newman and Robert Redford) whose wit and friendship carry them from Wyoming to Bolivia and death — won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and became one of the most successful films of 1969. The screenplay’s achievement is tonal: Goldman found a way to make an audience laugh with characters who are heading toward inevitable destruction, and the film’s final freeze-frame — the two men charging out into a hail of Bolivian bullets — is one of cinema’s iconic moments.
The screenplay also made Goldman the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, a position he held for much of the next two decades.
The Princess Bride (1973)
Goldman’s most beloved work is a novel that pretends to be an abridgement of a longer book by “S. Morgenstern” — a fictional author from a fictional country. The frame narrative, in which Goldman presents himself as an editor cutting Morgenstern’s satirical digressions to leave only “the good parts,” is a masterpiece of literary gamesmanship: the fictional editorial apparatus is more entertaining than most novels’ actual content.
The story itself — Westley and Buttercup, Inigo Montoya and his quest to avenge his father, Fezzik the gentle giant, the Cliffs of Insanity, the Fire Swamp, Prince Humperdinck, the Pit of Despair — is a fairy tale told with absolute sincerity and absolute irony simultaneously. Goldman loves these characters and this story without reservation, and the novel’s emotional power comes from the seriousness with which it treats the tropes of adventure and romance even as it acknowledges their absurdity.
The 1987 film adaptation, directed by Rob Reiner from Goldman’s screenplay, became a phenomenon — one of the most quoted films in American culture, and a work that proved Goldman’s thesis that a story can be simultaneously funny and genuinely moving.
Marathon Man (1974)
Goldman’s thriller about a graduate student who becomes entangled with a fugitive Nazi war criminal is his most commercially successful novel and his most efficiently plotted. The dentist-torture scene — in which the Nazi Szell (played by Laurence Olivier in the 1976 film) asks “Is it safe?” while drilling into the protagonist’s teeth without anaesthesia — became one of the most famous sequences in both the novel and the film.
Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983)
Goldman’s nonfiction masterpiece is a book about Hollywood that is funny, bitter, precise, and completely honest — qualities that are individually rare in Hollywood memoirs and unprecedented in combination. The book’s most famous declaration — “Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work” — became the most quoted sentence in film industry discourse.
Goldman illustrates his thesis with devastating examples: studio executives who passed on Raiders of the Lost Ark, films that were predicted to fail and became blockbusters, prestige projects that collapsed into expensive disasters. The book also includes a complete original screenplay (Da Vinci) with Goldman’s annotations explaining his choices, providing a rare practical education in screenwriting craft.
Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade (2000) continues in the same vein, covering Goldman’s later career and offering additional screenplay analyses.
All the President’s Men (1976)
Goldman’s adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s account of the Watergate investigation won his second Academy Award and remains one of the finest political films ever made. His screenplay solved the fundamental problem of the material — how to make a story about journalism (which is mostly phone calls and reading documents) visually compelling — by focusing on the relationship between the two reporters and on the physical act of investigation: the knocking on doors, the parking garage meetings, the late nights in the newsroom.
Other Screenplays
Goldman also wrote the screenplays for The Stepford Wives (1975), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Misery (1990, adapted from Stephen King), Maverick (1994), and The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), among others. His range — comedy, thriller, drama, period epic, horror — demonstrated a versatility that few screenwriters possess.
Critical Standing
Goldman is unusual among screenwriters in having an equally significant reputation as a novelist, and unusual among novelists in having an equally significant reputation as a screenwriter. The two careers informed each other: his novels have the pace and structure of screenplays, and his screenplays have the character depth and wit of novels.
Collecting Goldman
The Princess Bride (1973, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary collectible, typically bringing $300–$1,000. Marathon Man (1974, Delacorte) and Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983, Warner Books) first editions are also sought.