marriage of a young heir to a virtuous schoolteacher, plagued by inexplicable suicidal thoughts. It got the best reviews of Willingham's career, sold well, and firmly established him as one of the major authors of his day. Shelby Foote said the novel convinced him that Willingham was about “the only living American writer qualified to hold Dostoevsky’s coat in a street fight.” Willingham's next novel appeared six years later, another epic, Providence Island (1969), in which a male television executive is shipwrecked with a repressed, married woman and a plain, shy, androgynous one. The book was not as well reviewed as its predecessor but became a best-seller in paperback. Twentieth Century Fox paid a near-record amount to buy the rights for husband and wife Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward but never made the movie. The novels came slower as Willingham became a more prolific screenwriter. After the film version of End as a Man, producer Spiegel asked Willingham to work on The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) for director David Lean. Willingham traveled to Ceylon, where he met with Lean, who disliked Willingham's writing, and Willingham soon returned to the United States. Stanley Kubrick first hired Willingham to adapt Stefan Zweig’s novel The Burning Secret, but the project fell through and Kubrick eventually hired Willingham to work on the script of Paths of Glory (1957), of which Jim Thompson had written earlier drafts. The specific contributions by Kubrick, Thompson, and Willingham to the final script were disputed, and the matter went to arbitration with the Writers' Guild. Willingham continued working with Kirk Douglas, the star of Paths of Glory, receiving screen credit for The Vikings (1958), a box-office hit starring Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Soon after, Kubrick replaced Anthony Mann as director during filming of Spartacus (1960), which Douglas was starring in and producing, and Willingham joined the production to work on the screenplay and battle sequences. Though Willingham dropped out of the literary scene when he left New York in 1953, he maintained his friendship with Vladimir Nabokov. Broke and isolated, Nabokov was teaching at Cornell University and considering moving from the U.S. Willingham encouraged him to sell his books to Hollywood and passed along a copy of Lolita to Kubrick, who agreed to buy it. Willingham arranged the deal and wrote the first drafts, before giving way to Nabokov, who'd never written a screenplay but