Blatty won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Exorcist, and was nominated for Best Picture as its producer.
The film also earned Blatty a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama as producer.
Following completion of his master's degree in 1954, he joined the United States Air Force and served in the Psychological Warfare Division where he attained the rank of first lieutenant.
[2][3] He was the fifth and youngest child of Lebanese immigrants,[3][4] Mary (née Mouakad; Arabic: ماري معقد بلاتي), a devout Melkite Catholic and the niece of bishop Germanos Mouakkad, and Peter Blatty (Arabic: بيتر بلاتي), a cloth cutter.
[3] He was raised in what he described as "comfortable destitution" by his deeply religious mother, whose sole support came from peddling homemade quince jelly in the streets of Manhattan;[3][5] she once offered a jar of it to Franklin D. Roosevelt when the President was cutting the ribbon for the Queens–Midtown Tunnel, telling him, "For when you have company.
[8] "We never lived at the same address in New York for longer than two or three months at a time," Blatty told The Washington Post in 1972.
[6] Initially unable to find a job in teaching, he worked as a vacuum-cleaner door-to-door salesman, a beer-truck driver,[3] and as a United Airlines ticket agent.
[2][3] Mustering out of the Air Force, he joined the United States Information Agency and worked as an editor based in Beirut, Lebanon.
In 1961, while still pretending to be a prince, Blatty appeared as a contestant on the Groucho Marx quiz show You Bet Your Life, winning $10,000,[2][5] enough money to quit his job and to write full-time.
[2] It was at this point that Blatty began a collaboration with director Blake Edwards,[5] writing scripts for comedy films such as: A Shot in the Dark (1964),[5] What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?
[5] Blatty went on to win an Academy Award for his Exorcist screenplay,[5] as well as Golden Globes for Best Picture and Best Writing.
Movie critic Jerry Stein called it a "masterpiece" in The Cincinnati Post, and Peter Travers described it as "the finest large-scale American surrealist film ever made" in People magazine.
In 2011, The Exorcist was re-released in a 40th Anniversary Edition[5] in paperback, hardcover, and audiobook formats with new cover artwork.
The 40th Anniversary Edition of The Exorcist will have a touch of new material in it as part of an all-around polish of the dialogue and prose.
[22] In July 1975 he married his third wife, tennis professional Linda Tuero, with whom he had two children: restaurant entrepreneur Billy and photojournalist J. T.
[22][23] Following the dissolution of his first three marriages,[3] Blatty married Julie Alicia Witbrodt, his fourth wife, in 1983,[24][5] with whom he had two children.
[26] In 2012, he filed a canon law petition against his alma mater, Georgetown University, which he said has been at variance with Catholic Church teaching for decades, inviting speakers who support abortion rights and disobeying Pope John Paul II's instructions issued to Church-affiliated colleges and universities in 1990.
[29] Blatty died of multiple myeloma on January 12, 2017, at a hospital in Bethesda, five days after his 89th birthday.
[2][5] Studies of Blatty's work include G. S. J. Barclay's Anatomy of Horror: The Masters of Occult Fiction.