Before the age of 30, after three novels and a collection of short stories, The New Yorker was describing Willingham as having “fathered modern black comedy,”[2] his signature a dry, straight-faced humor, made funnier by its concealed comic intent.
[4] After dropping out of The Citadel, then working for the Office of War Information in Washington, D.C., Willingham moved to New York City where he wrote for 10 years, setting three novels there.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Willingham was considered at the forefront of the gritty, realistic new breed of postwar novelists: Norman Mailer, James Jones, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and others, many of whom comprised the Greenwich Village literary scene at the time.
[2] Willingham's career began in controversy with End as a Man (1947),[2] an indictment of the macho culture of military academies, introducing his first iconic character, sadistic Jocko de Paris.
William Styron reported visiting William Faulkner and noticing it prominently placed on his desk, and it appears on various published lists of “lost classics.” The original version was 415 pages long, but a 1964 edition, considerably shorter, is definitive, including a foreword from Willingham who explained how the pressure of End as a Man’s success led him to the grandiose idea of filling the follow-up book with obscure references to the next two in the trilogy.
Confusion about how to place writing considered both literary and prurient resulted in the release of two different paperback versions, one with the original title and another with racy cover art re-titled The Girl in the Dogwood Cabin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1994, Willingham also began a screenplay for filmmaker/Amblin founder Steven Spielberg titled Julie’s Valley about a pioneer family attacked by Native Americans on the Oregon Trail.
In a biography written for the Literary Guild, author Herman Wouk[15] blamed a twist of fate, a newspaper strike coinciding with publication of Eternal Fire, limiting its readership.
Fine[16] echoed this notion in his re-issue of the book in 1986, and perhaps this is a partial explanation why Eternal Fire, arguably deserving of recognition by the literary awards which would have secured him a brighter place in the postwar pantheon, was overlooked.