William Peter Blatty
Novelist
Bestselling author who turned his novel The Exorcist into an Academy Award-winning screenplay. He is also known for Elsewhere, Crazy, and other novels.
He lived in twenty-eight different residences over the course of his childhood, due to his family's constant evictions for failure to pay rent. He later studied English literature at both Georgetown University and The George Washington University.
He worked as a public relations director at both Loyola University (Los Angeles) and the University of Southern California.
He was born in New York City to Lebanese immigrant parents. His son, Peter Vincent Galahad Blatty, passed away at the young age of nineteen due to Myocarditis.
The film version of Blatty's novel The Exorcist was directed by William Friedkin.