William Goldman Books

William Goldman had two full careers, and either one would have been enough. Born in Chicago in 1931, he started as a novelist in 1957 with The Temple of Gold, then drifted into screenwriting in the mid 1960s. By 1969 he had written Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which won him his first Academy Award. His second came for All the President's Men in 1976. In between and after, he wrote or doctored an absurd share of the films your parents love: Marathon Man, Magic, The Stepford Wives, later the 1990 adaptation of Stephen King's Misery.

But the reason he is on a romantasy site is a novel he published in 1973. The Princess Bride is framed as Goldman's abridgement of a longer book by one S. Morgenstern, a writer who does not exist, cut down to just the good parts the way Goldman's father supposedly read it aloud to him as a boy. That framing device, a lie told with total sincerity, lets the book be two things at once: a genuine adventure about true love, pirates, revenge, and miracles, and a wry commentary on why we need stories like that at all. The grandfather reading to a sick grandson became the film's framing device too, and the book's constant interruptions, Goldman complaining about the boring Morgenstern passages he supposedly cut, remain one of the cleverest narrative games in popular fiction.

Westley and Buttercup are the nominal romance, but everyone knows Inigo Montoya runs away with the story. Twenty years of practice for a single sentence of revenge. Fezzik and his rhymes. Miracle Max haggling over the price of resurrection. Goldman adapted the novel himself for Rob Reiner's 1987 film, which is why the movie keeps the book's voice almost perfectly, and why both versions have outlived nearly everything else from their eras.

What defined Goldman as a writer was cynicism wrapped around a soft center. His nonfiction book Adventures in the Screen Trade, published in 1983, gave Hollywood its most quoted three words, nobody knows anything, and his whole career ran on that mix of wised-up realism and secret romanticism. The Princess Bride works because it keeps telling you life is not fair, love does not conquer all, and then makes you believe otherwise anyway. He died in November 2018 at age 87, and the tributes came from novelists and screenwriters in equal measure. He also spent decades as Hollywood's most trusted script doctor, the man studios quietly called when an expensive screenplay was broken, and he wrote both the novel and screenplay for The Ghost and the Darkness.

Heat level: zero out of 5. True love in Goldman is declared, mocked, tested, and won, but never consummated on the page. This is a kissing book in exactly the sense the grandson complains about, and that is the joke. He sits on this shelf as fairy-tale ancestry. Every romantasy that winks at its own tropes while playing them completely straight, every fake-out death, every as you wish in a caption, traces a line back to this one novel.

Start with the novel itself, even if you can quote the film from memory. The book has whole sections the movie could not fit, including the Zoo of Death, and Goldman's narrator interruptions are funnier and sadder in print. Then, if you get curious about the man, Adventures in the Screen Trade is one of the best books ever written about how stories get made and mangled. There is no series to keep up with and no sequel to wait for. One perfect book, done. It also holds up to rereading in a way few comfort books do, because the machinery is that well built.