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summer before beginning two years of graduate school, then announces to his parents that he has wasted his life, that he is sick of being their “goddamn ivy-covered status symbol,” and that he is taking to the road; early in the narrative, he spends three weeks hitchhiking and fighting forest fires in northern California. 23 Beatty himself was the product of a Virginia Baptist upbringing, he had been raised to behave like a southern gentleman, and in high school he had been both a football star and senior class president before going on to spend a year at Northwestern University. 24 And he knew his way around alienated characters, perhaps too well. The Graduate , as written, made sense for him.
    But somebody else also thought Webb’s novel would make a good movie and moved swiftly to obtain the rights. Lawrence Turman first heard about The Graduate when he read Orville Prescott’s mixed but appreciative review in The New York Times in October. 25 Prescott faulted the novel’s “preposterous climax,” in which Benjamin succeeds in getting to the church just in time to stop Elaine Robinson’s wedding to another man, and he complained that the book “raises questions about the psychological motivation of its hero and makes no effort to answer them.” Nonetheless, he wrote, the “sardonic comedy about the mysterious malaise that afflicts the spirits of some of the most intelligent of modern young people is written with exceptional skill…. He has created a character whose blunders and follies might just become as widely discussed as those of J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield.” 26
    The Graduate was published by New American Library, a relatively new house under the editorial direction of David Brown, a former executive in 20th Century-Fox’s New York offices who would return to the studio a couple of years later. Webb’s novel represented an experiment for the publishing company, one of two books it was using to test the marketplace for hardcovers rather than the paperbacks that had been its specialty (the other was Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service , a minor gamble itself since the 007 movie franchise was not yet established in the United States). 27 But despite Prescott’s warm (if qualified) endorsement of The Graduate , the book made little impact and quickly drowned in a sea of first-time literary fiction.
    Its failure was no surprise. Webb’s book arrived at an awkward moment for novels of its kind. The Graduate unfolds in a cool-temperatured, deadpan prose style that would likely have turned off any reader looking for an heir to the slangy, personalized voice of Holden Caulfield. Prescott’s comparison to Catcher in the Rye notwithstanding, the book was a latecomer to the genre of adolescent and postadolescent anomie and a bit too early to be part of the shift from stories of individual alienation that flourished in the 1950s to novels in which alienation was used as the touchstone of an entire generation later in the 1960s. While not autobiographical, Webb’s novel clearly owed a strong debt to a wrenching episode in his life that took place in 1960, when he was barely out of his teens and in his junior year at Williams College. He had fallen in love with a Bennington sophomore named Eve Rudd. Rudd got pregnant, and she and Webb became engaged; when her parents found out, they pulled her out of school and she had an abortion. In the wake of his split from Rudd (whom he eventually married), he began his novel. 28
    Like his protagonist, Benjamin, Webb was a top student (the novel’s “Halpingham Award” was based on a prize for creativity that Williams awarded Webb in his senior year), and like Benjamin, he was mired in a sense of cultural, geographic, and emotional dislocation; once he had finished at Williams, he moved to Brooklyn Heights, started and then abandoned a novel, then moved to