The Princess Bride
by William Goldman
Summary
Goldman frames the whole novel as his own abridgment of a much longer, allegedly forgotten satirical classic by a fictional author named S. Morgenstern, interrupting the story regularly with his own commentary explaining, in an entirely invented account, what he has supposedly cut and why, along with a fabricated story of reading the book as a sick child to his own father. Inside that frame, farm girl Buttercup falls for the farmhand Westley, who leaves to seek his fortune and is reported killed by the pirate Roberts. Years later, Buttercup, now betrothed against her will to the cruel Prince Humperdinck, is kidnapped by the criminal mastermind Vizzini and his two hired men, the brilliant swordsman Inigo Montoya, chasing a decades old revenge against the six fingered man who murdered his father, and the gentle giant Fezzik. A masked man in black pursues and defeats all three of them in sequence before revealing himself to Buttercup as Westley, who did not die at all but became the Dread Pirate Roberts himself. Humperdinck's men capture the pair, and Westley is tortured nearly to death in Humperdinck's dungeon by Count Rugen, who turns out to be the very six fingered man Inigo has spent his whole life hunting. Inigo and Fezzik rescue what is left of Westley, and a fast talking healer named Miracle Max revives him from being merely mostly dead. The group storms Humperdinck's castle during Buttercup's forced wedding; Inigo finally kills Rugen, delivering his long rehearsed line about his father one last time, and Westley bluffs the cowardly Humperdinck into surrender rather than actually fighting him at all. The four escape together on stolen horses, Goldman's narration breaking in once more to note, in character, that they did not entirely live happily ever after, since nobody really does, but that for that moment they had everything they wanted.
The joke of the abridgment frame does real work, letting Goldman mix earnest fairy tale adventure with modern, wisecracking commentary without either one undercutting the other, and the tonal shift between true romance and open parody is exactly what makes the book read faster than a straight fantasy novel of the same length would.
Historical Context & Significance
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published The Princess Bride in 1973 under its full original title, The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, the Good Parts Version. No literary prize marked its release, and the novel did not sell especially well in its own right at the time. Its wider fame arrived fourteen years later through Goldman's own screenplay for Rob Reiner's 1987 film adaptation, which earned only a modest thirty million dollars at the domestic box office against a sixteen million dollar budget before building a lasting following almost entirely through home video.
That film went on to win the 1988 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, a genre honor that reached the story through the movie rather than through Goldman's original novel. Cary Elwes as Westley, Robin Wright as Buttercup, Mandy Patinkin as Inigo, and Andre the Giant as Fezzik became so tied to the material in popular memory that the book itself is now often discovered by readers already familiar with the film, a reversal of the usual order between adaptation and source.