Like many screenwriters who came to Hollywood with a literary background, Calder Willingham clearly differentiates between the two forms in which he writes--novels and screenplays. He sees fiction as his "real work," his screenplays as work necessary to support his large family (he has six children). He has said, "I cannot take with genuine seriousness any of the films on which I have worked." Actually Willingham's seven screenplays are mostly admirable efforts, literate and intelligent work for such important films as Paths of Glory (1957), The Graduate (1967), Little Big Man (1970), and Thieves Like Us (1974).

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Eleanor Churchill and Calder Baynard Willingham, a hotel manager, Willingham was raised in the South. He attended the Citadel in South Carolina from 1940 to 1941 and the University of Virginia from 1941 to 1943. He married Helene Rothenberg in 1945, and they had a son, Paul. They were divorced a few years...