Charles Webb
Novelist who found fame, if not fortune, with his novel ‘The Graduate’
CHARLES Webb, who has died aged 81, was the author of The Graduate, the 1962 novel that became Mike Nichols’s era-defining film of the same name.
Starring Dustin Hoffman as the disaffected graduate and Anne Bancroft as the older woman who seduces him, the film crackled with sexual tension and assaulted the materialist values of white middle-class America while taking $100m (€90m) at the box office.
The book sold respectably for a first novel, but it was the film — released in 1967 with a Simon & Garfunkel chart-topping soundtrack — that propelled its hero, Benjamin Braddock, to fame.
But although the film, nominated for seven Oscars and winning Best Director, could have made him a rich man, Webb was an idealist who loathed the American obsession with status and determinedly avoided his fame and wealth.
Complaining that the book “defined my whole life. I just want to run away”, he sold the rights to the novel for $20,000 and never received another cent from the its success or its many stage adaptations. He signed his book royalties over to the Anti-Defamation
League and gave away his houses and possessions.
Committed to an existence of artistic purity with his like-minded wife, Webb published several poorly received novels before immersing himself in blue-collar work.
Having lived for many years in motels and trailer parks, in 1999, the couple moved to Newhaven in Sussex, where they lived in a spartan flat above a pet shop.
From there Webb published his first novel in 25 years, New Cardiff, which was made into a film, Hope Springs, starring Colin Firth.
Despite living in abject poverty, when he sold the film rights for £10,000 he used all the money to establish a prize for a work of art best expressing the difficulties of being part of “a creative minority”.
Charles Richard Webb was born in San Francisco on June 9, 1939. He was educated at Midland School and Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he read American History and Literature.
At university he met his wife, Eva Rudd, an East Coast heiress who traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower.
Love blossomed after they discovered a shared enthusiasm for the blacklisted screenwriter Ring Lardner. They had their first date in a graveyard; they arranged a shotgun marriage, which they cancelled after an abortion, and when they finally married they sold their wedding presents back to their guests and donated the money to charity.
Upon graduating, Webb obtained a grant and wrote The Graduate. Having returned his invitation to the premiere, Webb refused to be involved in the film’s promotion and assigned his novel’s ballooning royalties to the Anti-Defamation League.
When the producer offered him an ex gratia payment of $10,000, Webb declined.
Love, Roger (1969) was a circumspect love story about a man who — like Webb — seemed only to want to disappear. The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (1970) concerned a recently married couple undone by the husband’s addiction to watching other women, and a characterless wife manipulated by her older sister. It too was filmed, but failed to reprise the success of The Graduate.
Webb did write more but, after the poorly-received Elsinor (1977), Booze (1978) and
The Wilderness Effect (1982), he lapsed into silence.
Charles Webb, who died on June 16, married Eva Rudd in 1960. They had two sons.