The Princess Bride - William Goldman - NEW Audiobook CD
Brand New (still shrink wrapped): Abridged 3 CDs
Goldman's classic tale of high adventure, swashbuckling excitement and good-natured silliness, read by Rob Reiner. Fairy tale collides with reality in this adventure about a beautiful maiden who must be rescued from her price. Everything William Goldman liked about S. Morgenstern's original is here: good guys, bad guys, sword fighting, revenge, romance, and even "rodents of unusual size." Join Buttercup the beautiful maiden, Westley the plucky farm boy, Inigo Montoya the embittered swordsman, Prince Humperdinck the scheming villain, and many other characters in this swashbuckling tale of good-natured silliness. This is a true keepsake for devoted fans and an absolute treasure for those lucky enough to discover it for the first time.
With over one million copies in print, S. Morgenstern's classic fantasy, in the abridged "good parts" version by William Goldman, is a readers', or listners', favorite. The Princess Bride is a 1973 novel written by William Goldman. It was originally published in the United States by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
The book combines elements of comedy, adventure, romance and fairy tale. It is presented as if it were an abridgment of a work by S. Morgenstern.
It was made into a film of the same name in 1987 by Rob Reiner, and an attempt to adapt it into a musical was made by Adam Guettel.
A hilarious, swash-buckling fantasy of colorful characters: the handsome, the evil, the gentle, and the beautiful. All delight and enchant in this tale of wonder, thrilling danger, and sweet romance. Read by Rob Reiner, director of the movie The Princess Bride. A 1987 film was also made, based on the original 1973 novel of the same name by William Goldman, combining comedy, adventure, romance and fantasy.
The movie was directed by Rob Reiner from a screenplay by Goldman. The story is presented in the movie as a book being read by a grandfather (Peter Falk) to his sick grandson (Fred Savage), thus echoing the book's narrative style.
This film is number 50 on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies" and number 88 on The American Film Institute's (AFI) "AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions" listing the 100 greatest film love stories of all time.
About the Author
Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois. His brother was James Goldman, a playwright and screenwriter who died in 1998. William Goldman obtained a BA degree at Oberlin College in 1952 and a MA degree at Columbia University in 1956.
According to Goldman's memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, Goldman began writing when he took a creative writing course in college. He did not originally intend to become a screenwriter. His main interests were poetry, short stories, and novels. William Goldman published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before he began to write screenplays. He wrote mostly serious literary works until the death of his first agent when he then began writing thrillers starting with Marathon Man.[citation needed]
Goldman researched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for eight years and used Harry Longbaugh (a variant spelling of the Sundance Kid's real name) as his pseudonym for No Way to Treat a Lady. After deciding he did not want to write a cowboy novel, he turned the story into his first original screenplay and sold it for a record 0,000.[citation needed] He went on to use several of his novels as the foundation for his screenplays, such as the The Princess Bride. Among the many other popular scripts written by Goldman are The Stepford Wives (1975), Marathon Man (based on his novel) (1976); A Bridge Too Far (1977); Misery (1990); Chaplin (1992); Maverick (1994) and Absolute Power (1997).
In the 1980s he wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood. In one of these he famously sized up the entertainment industry by concluding: "Nobody knows anything."
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 has also won two Edgar Awards, from the Mystery Writers of America, for Best Motion Picture Screenplay: for Harper in 1967, and for Magic (adapted from his own 1976 novel) in 1979.
He was married to Ilene Jones until their divorce in 1991. The couple had two daughters.
Simon Morgenstern is both a pseudonym and a narrative device invented by Goldman to add another layer to his novel The Princess Bride. He presents his novel as being an abridged version of a work by the fictional Morgenstern, an author from the equally fictional country of Florin.
The details of Goldman's life given in the introduction and commentary for The Princess Bride are also largely fictional. For instance, he says that his wife is a psychiatrist and that he was inspired to abridge Morgenstern's The Princess Bride for his only child, a son. (The Princess Bride actually originated as a bedtime story for Goldman's two daughters.) He not only treats Morgenstern and the countries of Florin and Guilder as real, but even claims that his own father was Florinese and had emigrated to America.
At one point in The Princess Bride, Goldman's commentary indicates that he had wanted to add a passage elaborating a scene skipped over by Morgenstern. He explains that his editors would not allow him to take such liberties with the "original" text, and encourages readers to write to his publisher to request a copy of this scene. Both the original publisher and its successor have responded to such requests with letters describing their supposed legal problems with the Morgenstern estate.
In the 25th Anniversary Edition of The Princess Bride, Goldman claimed that he wanted to adapt the sequel written by Morgenstern, Buttercup's Baby, but he was unable to do so because Morgenstern's estate wanted Stephen King to do the abridgment instead. He also continued the fictional details of his own life, claiming that his psychiatrist wife had divorced him, and his son had grown to have a son of his own.
Goldman also wrote The Silent Gondoliers under the Morgenstern name.
William Goldman, screenwriter, prior to Dreamcatcher, adapted the Stephen King books Hearts in Atlantis and Misery for Castle Rock Entertainment.
Goldman won Academy Awards® for his adaptation of the incisive political expose, All the President's Men, and for his original script, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Both screenplays also earned him Writers Guild Awards. Other honors include Lifetime Achievement Awards from the WGA and from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. Goldman has been an author for forty-five years.
Since his first novel, The Temple of Gold, he has written more than two dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction.
His name may be most familiar from award-winning screenplays such as All the President's Men, but William Goldman had a previous life as an original, enthralling novelist who is worth exploring both for his books that would become great movies (The Princess Bride, Marathon Man) and for the ones that didn't. |
