Publication Order of The Exorcist Books
| The Exorcist | 1971 |
| Legion | 1983 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! | 1963 |
| I, Billy Shakespeare! | 1965 |
| Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane | 1966 |
| The Ninth Configuration | 1978 |
| Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing | 1996 |
| Dimiter / The Redemption | 2010 |
| Crazy | 2010 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Elsewhere | 1999 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Which Way to Mecca, Jack? | 1960 |
| I’ll Tell Them I Remember You | 1973 |
| William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist: From Novel to Film | 1974 |
| If There Were Demons, Then Perhaps There Were Angels | 1999 |
| Finding Peter | 2015 |
About William Peter Blatty
William Peter Blatty (born 7 January 1928, died 12 January 2017) was an American novelist, screenwriter and film director. He is best known for the 1971 horror novel “The Exorcist” and for his screenplay for the 1973 film version, which won him the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Blatty was born in New York City, the fifth and youngest child of Lebanese immigrants. His parents separated when he was a toddler and he was raised by his devout mother, who supported the family by selling homemade quince jelly on the streets of Manhattan; he lived at 28 addresses as a child. He won scholarships to Brooklyn Preparatory, a Jesuit school, and to Georgetown University, where he took a degree in English in 1950. After a master’s degree from George Washington University in 1954 he served in the United States Air Force, then worked as an editor for the United States Information Agency in Beirut.
His first book, “Which Way to Mecca, Jack?” (1960), was a humorous account of his early life and his time in Lebanon. In 1961 he won $10,000 on the Groucho Marx quiz show “You Bet Your Life”, which allowed him to write full time. Three comic novels followed, among them “John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!”, and he wrote screenplays for the director Blake Edwards, including “A Shot in the Dark” (1964).
“The Exorcist”, the story of a twelve-year-old girl possessed by a demon, topped the New York Times Best Seller list for 17 weeks and sold more than 13 million copies in the United States. Blatty adapted it for the screen with the director William Friedkin, and it became the first horror film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. He continued the story in “Legion” (1983), which he filmed himself as “The Exorcist III” (1990).
In 1978 he reworked his 1966 novel “Twinkle, Twinkle, ’Killer’ Kane” as “The Ninth Configuration”, and his 1980 film of it, which he wrote, directed and produced, won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. His later fiction includes “Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing”, “Elsewhere”, “Dimiter” and “Crazy”. “Finding Peter” (2015) is a memoir about the death of his son Peter in 2006. Blatty received the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award and died of multiple myeloma in Bethesda, Maryland.
Photo: Terry Ballard, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).