William Goldman’s first novel, “The Temple of Gold,” was published in 1957. In the part of the timeline of American cultural history devoted to expressions of youthful male restlessness, that’s exactly between “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Goodbye, Columbus” and roughly coincident with “On the Road.” The literature of the period in particular bristles with the energy of young men in revolt against the expectations of their parents and the stultifying conventions of postwar society.

Goldman’s protagonist is a smart, horny, confused professor’s son named Raymond whose raging search for authenticity looks, in hindsight, like a fairly standard coming-of-age story. A note from the editors on the back of the first Bantam paperback edition insists otherwise, saying that “an angry library trustee” had called the book “a blueprint for juvenile delinquency” and demanded its removal from the shelves. Hyping a young writer’s shocking candor about sex and his unflinching honesty about life, the blurb promises that the reader of “The Temple of Gold” will confront “the truth about this country’s most controversial generation, told by one of them.”

Perhaps, but there’s no doubt that Goldman, who died on Friday at 87, was a member of one of the country’s most formidable literary generations, a near-contemporary of Philip Roth, John Updike, Joan Didion and Toni Morrison. Of course it isn’t as a literary figure that he’s most remembered, but rather as a screenwriter, best known for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “All the President’s Men” and “The Princess Bride.” He was also a wily truth-teller about the ways of Hollywood, the author of many memorable lines in and about movies. (“Nobody knows anything.” “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”)

[Read our obituary of William Goldman.]

If he’d stuck exclusively to novels, Goldman would most likely be eulogized now as a minor author, a middle-range talent who plied his craft in the shadow of more illustrious contemporaries. Instead, he occupies a special place in the history of movies. He wasn’t the first novelist to strike out for Hollywood, but he managed the crossover with exemplary dexterity, professionalism and panache.