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William Goldman (born August 12, 1931) is an American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright.

He was born in Highland Park, Illinois and obtained a BA degree at Oberlin College, 1952 and an MA degree at Columbia University, 1956. He had published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before going to Hollywood to write screenplays, including several based on his novels. In the 1980s he wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood (in one of these he remarked that in Hollywood Nobody knows anything), and wrote more novels. Adapting his novel The Princess Bride to the screen marked his re-entry into screenwriting. He is often called in as an uncredited script doctor on troubled projects.

Simon Morgenstern is a pseudonym, a narrative device invented by him to add another layer to his work, The Princess Bride. Goldman claims S. Morgenstern is the original Florinese author of The Princess Bride while he credits himself as the abridger who's bringing the classic to an American audience. Goldman has also written The Silent Gondoliers under Morgenstern's name.

He has won two Academy Awards: an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for All the President's Men.

He married Ilene Jones: they were divorced in 1991. Contrary to his fictionalised biography in The Princess Bride, he has two daughters and no sons.