article

This article is about the novelist. For the mathematician, see William Goldman (professor).

William Goldman (born August 12, 1931) is an American novelist, playwright and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter.

Biography

Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in Highland Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and obtained a BA degree at Oberlin College in 1952 and an MA degree at Columbia University in 1956. William Goldman had been estranged for many years from his brother, playwright James Goldman, before James's death in 1998.

William Goldman had published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before he began to write screenplays. Several of his novels he later used as the foundation for his screenplays. In the 1980s he wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood (in one of these he remarked that in Hollywood "Nobody knows anything"). He then returned to writing novels. He then adapted his novel The Princess Bride to the screen, which marked his re-entry into screenwriting. He is often called in as an uncredited script doctor on troubled projects.

Simon Morgenstern is both a pseudonym and a narrative device invented by him to add another layer to The Princess Bride. Goldman claims S. Morgenstern is the original Florinese author of The Princess Bride and credits himself merely as an abridger who is bringing the classic to an American audience. Goldman also wrote The Silent Gondoliers under Morgenstern's name.

Goldman has won two Academy Awards: an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for All the President's Men.

He was married to Ilene Jones until their divorce in 1991. Contrary to his fictionalized biography in The Princess Bride, he has two daughters and no sons.

Credits

Broadway

Screenplays

Television

Novels

Non-fiction and memoirs

Children's books

  • Wigger (1974)

Other

  • New World Writing Number 17 (1960)
    • A collection of stories, poems and articles by several authors, with an 11-page story entitled "Da Vinci" by Goldman
  • The Craft of the Screenwriter by John Brady (1981)
    • Includes a profile on Goldman and a lengthy interview about his craft
  • The Movie Business Book by James E. Squire (Editor) (1992)
    • Includes an As Told By William Goldman piece
  • Writers on Directors by Susan Gray (1999)
    • Goldman has a piece on Rob Reiner in this book, and another on Norman Jewison
  • The First Time I Got Paid For It: Writers' Tales From the Hollywood Trenches (2000)
    • Introduction by Goldman
  • Goldman speaks candidly about his writing process in American Film Foundation's series Screenwriters: Words into Motion.

1931 births | Living people | American screenwriters | American children's writers | American novelists | American dramatists and playwrights | Columbia University alumni | Jewish American writers | People from Illinois | Oberlin College alumni

William Goldman | William Goldman | William Goldman | ויליאם גולדמן | William Goldman | William Goldman

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "William Goldman".

Home Page • arts • business • computers • games • health • hospitals • home • kids & teens • news • physicians • recreation• reference • regional • science • shopping • society • sports • world