William J. Monahan (born November 3, 1960) is an Academy Award-winning American screenwriter and novelist. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Monahan moved to New York City to pursue a career as a journalist, writer and critic. He wrote for the New York Press, Talk, Maxim, and Spy magazine. In 1997, he won a Pushcart Prize for a short story he had published in a liter...
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William J. Monahan (born November 3, 1960) is an Academy Award-winning American screenwriter and novelist. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Monahan moved to New York City to pursue a career as a journalist, writer and critic. He wrote for the New York Press, Talk, Maxim, and Spy magazine. In 1997, he won a Pushcart Prize for a short story he had published in a literary journal, and in 2000, he received critical acclaim for Light House: A Trifle, his first novel.
Monahan went to work in Hollywood in 1998, when Warner Bros. bought the film rights to Light House: A Trifle, which had not yet been published, and contracted him to adapt it to the screen. In 2001, 20th Century Fox bought Monahan's spec script about the Barbary Wars called Tripoli. Although his first two commercial screenplays were never made into films, he was hired to write many scripts over the following years, and eventually his screenplay...
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