William Goldman

Anglo-Jewish writer William (Willy) Goldman was born into a working-class Orthodox family in London, the child of Russian and Romanian immigrants. Goldman left school at age fourteen to work at a sweatshop, and abandoned traditional Judaism. Partly to escape poverty, he took up boxing as a sport; as a team captain he felt that he could “stand up straight and not be frightened.” In the 1930s, he met John Lehmann, founder of the magazine New Writing, who employed him and published his stories. Goldman’s works, often satiric, portrayed the lives of hard-working Jewish immigrants in London’s East End. The British novelist C. P. Snow once described him as “our best reporter of the East End.” Goldman was also compared to Dickens by more than one reviewer.