William Goldman (The Princess Bride) The Princess Bride (1987)

William Goldman was born in 1931 in Highland Park, Illinois, raised in a difficult middle-class family his memoirs would later return to obsessively (his father, an alcoholic, took his own life when Goldman was sixteen). He took an MA in English at Columbia, served in the Army, and published his first novel, The Temple of Gold, in 1957. He wrote nine more novels through the 1960s and 1970s, but it was the screenwriting work that made him: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969, Oscar), All the President's Men (1976, Oscar), Marathon Man (1976, adapted from his own novel), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Magic (1978), Misery (1990), The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), Absolute Power (1997), The General's Daughter (1999).

He also wrote two of the most influential books on the working life of a screenwriter: Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), the source of the line "Nobody knows anything," and Which Lie Did I Tell? (2000).

The novel he loved most of his own work, by his own repeated account, was The Princess Bride.

The 1973 novel

Goldman published The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, the "Good Parts" Version Abridged by William Goldman in 1973. The conceit was elaborate: the book purported to be Goldman's abridgment of a fictional Florinese satirist named S. Morgenstern, whose original was a long political satire on the Florin court that Goldman remembered his immigrant father reading to him during a childhood illness. Goldman, the conceit went, had skipped to the "good parts" — the kissing, the swordfights, the giants — and was offering the reader the same.

The frame is itself a kind of love letter. The "father reading to a sick son" structure that the film converts into a grandfather-and-grandson is rooted in the novel's faux-memoir, where Goldman (or his fictional version) is the sick child. The book has always been a love story for two: the inner story is for the reader, and the outer story is for fathers and children.

"I told the kids one bedtime story when they were little: I told them this story. They asked for it night after night. The book is just an extension of those bedtimes." — William Goldman, Which Lie Did I Tell? (2000) (book, not available online)

Decade of false starts

The screenplay was written in the mid-1970s. Twentieth Century Fox owned the script briefly, then reverted; Norman Jewison, François Truffaut, Robert Redford, and Richard Lester were attached at various points across the late 1970s and early 1980s. Each project collapsed for a different reason. Goldman has written at length about the experience as one of the most painful of his career.

"I had basically given up. I had decided that the book was unfilmable, and that I would be lucky if it ever happened. And then Rob Reiner walked in." — William Goldman, Vanity Fair (2012)

The film adaptation

Goldman wrote a single screenplay draft for Rob Reiner in 1986 — his own self-adaptation of the book. Reiner shot it largely as written. Goldman has said publicly that the experience was the most rewarding of his Hollywood career; the film's dialogue is, in many places, transposed verbatim from the novel. The major adjustments were structural: the frame's father became a grandfather (so Peter Falk could play it), and the novel's longer interior digressions on the Florin court were cut entirely.

The film opened to modest box office. Goldman's expectation that no one would see it became, instead, the experience of watching a book he had loved for fifteen years gradually become one of the most-quoted American films of its decade.

He died in November 2018 at age eighty-seven. In the obituaries, The Princess Bride was named almost universally as the work he himself prized most.