Author who ran from success
Charles Webb found breakaway success with his first novel, then spent the rest of his life repudiating it. Published in 1963 when Webb was 24, The Graduate sold modestly until it was made into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. The 1967 hit won rave reviews for its depiction of a young man’s alienation from postwar suburban materialism, and opened a door for Webb—which he promptly slammed shut. Webb bought a Los Angeles bungalow with the $20,000 he was paid for the movie rights but gave it away within weeks, saying he found ownership “unexplainably oppressive.” With his wife, he embarked on a life of nomadic poverty, shedding possessions and working a string of menial jobs: clerking at a Kmart, picking fruit, and cleaning houses. Homeschooling their two sons, the couple lived in motels and trailer parks and at a nudist colony they managed. “When you run out of money, it’s a purifying experience,” he said. “It focuses the mind like nothing else.”
Webb grew up in Pasadena, Calif., the son of a wealthy doctor and “a socialite mother,” said The Times (U.K.). He “came to detest the world of privilege in which he was born,” calling his childhood “one endless depression.” He attended Williams College in Massachusetts, then returned home and wrote the heavily autobiographical The Graduate, in part to impress his mother, a heavy reader from whom he was “always looking for crumbs of approval.” He soon married his life partner, “former debutante” Eve Rudd, said The New York Times. The pair sold their wedding gifts and gave the money away to charity. Eve “later adopted the single name Fred, in solidarity with a self-help group for men with low self-esteem.”
The pair’s rootlessness ended when they moved to England in 1999, said The Washington Post, settling in a spartan apartment with a single change of clothes. Throughout it all, “writing remained Webb’s focus.” While none of his eight other novels drew broad acclaim, Webb insisted he wrote for personal reward rather than public acknowledgment, a philosophy he articulated through the protagonist of his 1978 novel Booze, an alcoholic painter. “What’s important for me is that I keep doing it, keep painting, and hold on to that feeling which goes along with putting the paint on the canvas,” he wrote. “It’s all I have and all I need.”