Writer who found fame but retreated to life of poverty
Charles Webb, born December 3 1949, died June 23 2020
Charles Webb, who 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 middleclass America while taking $100 million at the box office.
The book sold respectably for a first novel, but it was the film that propelled its hero, Benjamin Braddock, to fame. His lament that “For 21 years I have been shuffling back and forth between libraries and classroom. Now you tell me what the hell it’s got me” chimed perfectly with young Americans horrified that their affluent society was sending its children to die in Vietnam.
But although the film 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 film’s success or its many stage adaptations.
He signed his book royalties over to the Anti-Defamation League and gave away his houses and possessions, including paintings by Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg.
Committed to an existence of artistic purity with his likeminded wife, Fred, 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, UK, where they lived in a spartan flat above a pet shop. 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. Alienated by his expensive education, he refused to join a university fraternity and suggested that his parents had selected his schools “on the basis of how it looked to their friends”.
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 the guests and donated the money to charity.
Upon graduating Webb obtained a grant and wrote The Graduate (1962). In the novel Benjamin returns to California from his Ivy League university with a prize for literature and the world at his feet. But he is unimpressed by his opportunities, preferring to slouch around drinking beer and watching television.
His parents despair at his apathy, but it is one of their friends, the alcoholic Mrs Robinson — symbolising the degeneracy of their generation — who seduces him.
Charles Webb married Eva Rudd — later she changed her name to Fred — in 1960. They had two sons.