Calder Willingham

Calder Baynard Willingham, Jr. (December 23, 1922 – February 19, 1995) was an American novelist and screenwriter. Before the age of 30, after three novels and a collection of short stories, The New Yorker was describing Willingham as having “fathered modern black comedy,” his signature a dry, straight-faced humor, made funnier by its concealed comic intent. His work matured over six more novels, including Eternal Fire (1963), which Newsweek wrote “deserves a place among the dozen or so novels that must be mentioned if one is to speak of greatness in American fiction.” He had a significant career in cinema too, with screenplays including Paths of Glory (1957), One-Eyed Jacks (1960), The Graduate (1967) and Little Big Man (1970). 2Life and career Willingham was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Eleanor Churchill (Willcox) and Calder Baynard Willingham, a hotel manager. After dropping out of The Citadel, then working for the Office of War Information in Washington, D.C., Willingham moved to New York City where he wrote for 10 years, setting three novels there. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Willingham was considered at the forefront of the gritty, realistic new breed of postwar novelists: Norman Mailer, James Jones, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and others, many of whom comprised the Greenwich Village literary scene at the time.Willingham's career began in controversy with End as a Man (1947), an indictment of the macho culture of military academies, introducing his first iconic character, sadistic Jocko de Paris. The story included graphic hazing, sex, and suggested homosexuality. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice filed obscenity charges against its publisher Vanguard Press. The charges ultimately were dropped, but not before a trial that made the book a cause célèbre in which famous writers rallying to its defens