William Peter Blatty was the American novelist and screenwriter who wrote The Exorcist — first as a bestselling novel, then as an Oscar-winning screenplay.
Before he was horror’s defining author, he was a comedy writer — Blake Edwards’s farce partner, a ghost-writer for Dear Abby, a man who won his freedom on a game show while pretending to be an Arab prince. The horror was not a detour. Blatty called The Exorcist “an argument for God” and “an apostolic work,” and he spent the rest of his life — two more panels of his Trilogy of Faith, a lawsuit, a 27-year argument over a film’s cut — defending that intention. He remains the genre’s clearest author-as-auteur case: one man wrote the novel, produced the film with director approval, won its screenplay Oscar, and argued his own sequel’s cut with a studio, in public, for 26 years.
Quick Specs
- Born: 7 January 1928, New York City
- Died: 12 January 2017, Bethesda, Maryland, aged 89
- Education: Georgetown University — English, class of 1950; George Washington University — master’s, 1954
- Known for: The Exorcist (novel 1971, film 1973), The Ninth Configuration (1980), The Exorcist III (1990)
- Honour: Academy Award for the Exorcist screenplay; Best Picture nominee as its producer
Comfortable Destitution
Blatty was born in New York City, the youngest of five children of Lebanese immigrant parents — his father, Peter, a cloth cutter; his mother, Mary, a devout Catholic and the niece of a bishop. His father left the family in Blatty’s early childhood — the sources disagree on his exact age, and this page does not pick one — and his mother raised the children in what Blatty himself called “comfortable destitution,” supporting the family by peddling homemade quince jelly on Manhattan streets and moving constantly ahead of eviction: 28 different addresses by his own count. Jesuit schooling was the ladder out. He won a scholarship to Brooklyn Preparatory, graduating as class valedictorian in 1946, and another to Georgetown University, where he took his degree in English in 1950. His verdict on those years, given in a 2015 interview: “Those years at Georgetown were probably the best years of my life. Until then, I’d never had a home.” A master’s in English literature from George Washington University followed in 1954. He joined the United States Air Force and served in its Psychological Warfare Division, attaining first lieutenant, then worked for the United States Information Agency in Beirut, editing its News Review (the lineages disagree on the exact years). Back in the United States he became head of public relations at Loyola University of Los Angeles and publicity director at the University of Southern California.
The turn came by masquerade. Blatty had once talked his way through Beirut society posing as a Saudi prince — “Prince Xeer” — and turned the stunt into a Saturday Evening Post article, “They Believed I Was an Arab Prince” (1958). Still trading on the persona, he appeared on Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life and won $10,000 — enough, in every account, to quit his day job and write full-time. He never held a regular job again. He was married four times; the first three marriages ended in divorce, and his fourth wife, Julie, whom he married in 1983, survived him. The reference counts of his children disagree — seven in one, eight in the AP obituary — so this page states no total. His son Peter died in 2006, the loss at the centre of his last book.
The Comedy Writer
His first book, Which Way to Mecca, Jack? — a comic, fictionalised memoir of his early life and his Lebanon years — appeared in 1960 (some lists date it 1959; the split is in the record). The comic novels followed: John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! (1963), I, Billy Shakespeare (1965) and Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane (1966) — critically praised, modest sellers, carrying the New York Times line Blatty quoted for the rest of his life: “Nobody can write funnier lines than William Peter Blatty.” In the same years he ghost-wrote Abigail Van Buren’s Dear Teenager (1959). The credits, checked one by one: The Man from the Diners’ Club (1963), credited as “Bill Blatty”; A Shot in the Dark (1964) — screenplay by Blake Edwards and William Peter Blatty, the second Clouseau film; his own John Goldfarb adapted for the screen (1965); Promise Her Anything (1965); What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966), his sole screenplay; Gunn (1967); The Great Bank Robbery (1969); and Darling Lili (1970), written by Blatty and Edwards. His Clouseau credit is A Shot in the Dark alone — he had no hand in The Pink Panther (1963), and this page does not give him one.
1949: The Case, Kept in Two Boxes
The seed of The Exorcist is documented, and the documentation has edges this page respects. In August 1949 the Washington Post ran a front-page story — “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil’s Grip” — about Jesuit exorcisms performed on a 14-year-old Maryland boy, identified in print only under pseudonyms (“Roland Doe,” “Robbie Mannheim”). Blatty, then a Georgetown student, encountered the case through the Post story and through a Georgetown professor who spoke about it in class; in his own account he thought that if someone could “dig into this and authenticate it… what a gift to the faith.” Two decades later, researching the novel, he corresponded with the exorcist himself, Fr. William S. Bowdern — their letters, dated 1968 to 1975, survive in Blatty’s papers at Georgetown — and Bowdern, who would not break his promise of confidentiality, assured him, in Blatty’s retelling, that “the case in which I was involved was the real thing.” That is the documented box. The other box holds claims: the phenomena of the case — moving furniture, voices, levitation — are claims recorded in a diary kept by an assisting priest, Fr. Raymond J. Bishop, and in later retellings, and one of the last surviving participating priests, Fr. Walter Halloran, expressly declined to go on record that the boy was possessed. This page reports the claims as claims. A 2021 investigation identified the boy as Ronald Edwin Hunkeler (1935–2020) — reported here as that investigation’s finding; the contemporary record used pseudonyms. What Blatty made of the material is fact: he changed the boy to a 12-year-old girl, moved the story to Georgetown, and built, in his words, a “supernatural detective story.”
The Exorcist: Novel, Then Film
The novel was written in roughly nine to ten months — Blatty’s own account varies — in a rented cabin at Lake Tahoe, and published by Harper & Row in 1971. It nearly died quietly. Initial sales were so poor that his publisher gave him a farewell lunch; during it, The Dick Cavett Show called — a guest had cancelled — and Blatty, as last-minute replacement, delivered a 41-minute monologue on the book to a host who opened by admitting he hadn’t read it. The book then went to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, held No. 1 for 17 weeks, stayed on the list 57 weeks, and sold 13 million copies in the obituary record. His intent never wavered, stated here as his: “It’s an argument for God. I intended it to be an apostolic work, to help people in their faith.” In the novel’s own acknowledgments he thanked Georgetown professor Bernard Wagner “for teaching me to write” and the Jesuits “for teaching me to think.”
The film (1973) was directed by William Friedkin — never by Blatty, whatever the franchise’s later marketing implies. Blatty’s roles were three, and distinct: author of the novel; screenwriter, winning the Academy Award in the era’s exact category, “Writing (Screenplay — based on material from another medium),” at the 46th Academy Awards — the award now called Best Adapted Screenplay — plus the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay; and producer, the Academy listing the film’s Best Picture nomination under “William Peter Blatty, Producer,” with the Best Picture — Drama Golden Globe also his as producer. He had director approval under his deal and chose Friedkin — in Friedkin’s own memoir account, because at a 1966 meeting over a script Blatty had written for Edwards, Friedkin bluntly called the script bad, and Blatty “believed you’d never bullshit me.” The Exorcist, with Linda Blair as Regan, Ellen Burstyn as her mother, Jason Miller as Karras and Max von Sydow as Father Merrin, received ten Academy Award nominations and won two — Blatty’s screenplay and Best Sound — and was the first horror film nominated for Best Picture. The creative battle was real: Friedkin cut material Blatty valued, including the spider-walk sequence and a theological conversation between Karras and Merrin, and Blatty objected for decades. In 2000, at Blatty’s urging, Friedkin prepared the extended version marketed as “The Version You’ve Never Seen,” restoring both — critic Mark Kermode’s label for it, quoted as his: “not the director’s cut… if anything, it is the writer’s cut.” Blatty’s own verdict: “It’s the version that I’ve wanted for 25 years.” In 2001 Blatty and Friedkin jointly sued Warner Bros., alleging the studio had diverted and under-reported profits from the film; their lawyer described the amount sought only as “an eight-figure amount.” No outcome is stated here, because none is public in a form the record supports.
The Trilogy of Faith
Blatty described his serious work as a Trilogy of Faith. Its second panel is The Ninth Configuration, and its chain has three titles to keep straight: the comic-tragic novel Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane (1966), substantially reworked and republished as the novel The Ninth Configuration (1978), then the film The Ninth Configuration (1980), which Blatty wrote, produced and directed — his directorial debut. It is a tragi-comic faith drama set in a military psychiatric castle, its inmates — Stacy Keach, Scott Wilson, Jason Miller among them — debating the existence of God; not a horror film in any flat sense, and not an Exorcist sequel. It won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay, and Blatty regarded it, in Mark Kermode’s obituary account, with particular pride: “in it were distilled all the recurrent themes of his writing: the mystery of faith, the problem of evil, the persistence of the soul.”
The third panel is Legion (1983), the true prose sequel to The Exorcist: Lt. Kinderman investigating the Gemini Killer murders, the Karras story continued. When the novel was omitted from the New York Times bestseller list despite qualifying sales, Blatty sued — Blatty v. New York Times Co. reached the California Supreme Court in 1986, which ruled for the Times. He lost; the case stands as documented emblem, not vindication. As The Exorcist III (1990), with George C. Scott as Kinderman, Brad Dourif as the Gemini Killer and Ed Flanders as Fr. Dyer, it became his second and final film as director and his final screenplay credit. The theatrical film is a compromise text, and the compromise is precisely documented: Blatty’s original cut had no exorcism climax and no Fr. Morning character; after previews, Morgan Creek required reshoots — a new exorcism ending, Fr. Morning (Nicol Williamson) added, Jason Miller’s return expanded beyond Dourif’s solo performance. The film’s famous hospital-corridor sequence is in both versions, and it is Blatty’s — the reshoot story does not swallow it. In 2016, Scream Factory released William Peter Blatty’s Legion: an assembly of his original vision built from surviving film elements and VHS dailies, because his original cut itself is lost — a reconstruction, not a recovered director’s cut, and the rare case of a horror author’s text slowly winning a public argument with a studio over 26 years.
One sequel carries his name and none of his work. Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) was directed by John Boorman and written by William Goodhart, with Richard Burton and Louise Fletcher, based only on characters by Blatty. He refused involvement in the standard account and publicly denounced the result. It appears in this biography only to be excluded from his filmography.
The Last Books
The later bibliography, stated precisely: Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing (1996), a comic Hollywood novel; Elsewhere, first published as a novella in the anthology 999 (1999) and as a standalone book in 2009; If There Were Demons Then Perhaps There Were Angels (2001), his own story of The Exorcist; Dimiter (2010), a thriller; Crazy (2010), set in 1940s New York; and Finding Peter (2015), a memoir about his son Peter’s death and his conviction of an afterlife. For the novel’s 40th anniversary in 2011 he revised The Exorcist itself and added new material — saying on NPR that he had never set out to frighten anyone: “I have no recollection of intending to frighten anyone at any point in time,” and, as his standard closer, “I sleep with a night light.” The alumnus who called Georgetown his first home also became its canonical critic: in May 2012 he announced a canon-law petition effort against the university for failing, in his view, to live up to its Catholic identity, founding the Father King Society to press the case. No Vatican outcome is established in this record, and none is claimed here. He died at a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on 12 January 2017, of multiple myeloma, his widow Julie told the AP — five days after his 89th birthday. Friedkin announced the death publicly the next day. Georgetown holds the footprint: the William P. Blatty Papers, with the manuscripts, galleys and Bowdern letters, and a collection preserving the student photographs, the prince article, and a letter about the 1947 Villanova mascot kidnapping.
Why He Matters
The Exorcist is the moment horror claimed full literary and cinematic prestige: 57 weeks on the bestseller list, 13 million copies, ten Oscar nominations, the first horror film ever nominated for Best Picture — and it did so as explicit Catholic argument, in its author’s stated design, which is why it is still argued about as theology and not only as scares. The theological horror that followed, possession treated with documentary seriousness and doctrine as plot mechanics, runs through Blatty’s insistence that the material be taken seriously as faith. And the dual identity is the story: a Dear Abby ghost-writer, a game-show prince and the funniest-lines man in American comic fiction became the defining horror novelist of the 1970s by pitching a supernatural detective story when the comedy work dried up — then spent five decades proving the horror was not the detour. Comedy, madness and faith are one continuous body of work in Blatty, and Exorcist III‘s afterlife is its proof: the author’s version, assembled from scraps in 2016, outliving the studio’s ending. Nobody else in horror owns their landmark the way he owned his — novel, screenplay, producer’s chair, and the argument, all the way down.
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