“The Graduate”

From Wikipedia:

“The Graduate is a 1963 novella by Charles Webb, who wrote it shortly after graduating from Williams College. It tells the story of Benjamin Braddock, who, while pondering his future after his graduation, has an affair with the older Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father’s business partner, before falling in love with her daughter Elaine.

On the episode of the AMC television series “Movies That Shook the World” devoted to the film adaptation, Webb revealed the identity of the real-life inspiration for Mrs. Robinson: Jane Ericson (exact spelling unknown), the wife of an associate of Webb’s father. However, that was the extent of any similarity with the novel; Webb denied having a relationship with her.”

From Literary Hub:

“Born in San Francisco in 1939, [Charles] Webb was raised in Southern California’s old-money Pasadena, where his father was a socially prominent heart specialist. Young Charles attended Midland School, a small Santa Barbara–area boarding school that taught self-reliance and independent thinking, then was accepted into the class of 1961 at venerable Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Dating back to 1793, Williams has been hailed as one of America’s top liberal arts institutions. Though in Webb’s day the student body was exclusively male (female students were admitted beginning in 1970), the young man didn’t lack for female companionship. In his junior year he met Eve Rudd, a Bennington sophomore whose parents were on the faculty of a Connecticut prep school. The legend (one of many surrounding the pair) is that Charles and Eve’s first date took place in a local graveyard. In any case, both were totally smitten, and before long Eve was pregnant. They decided to marry, but soon changed their minds. That’s when Eve’s parents whisked her off for an abortion, then enrolled their errant daughter in a Baptist college out West, the better to keep her from Webb’s embrace.

After graduation, a restless Webb returned to his home state. He audited a chemistry course through the University of California, Berkeley, toying with the idea of becoming a doctor like his father. In the Bay Area, he would eventually reunite with Eve, who’d come to San Francisco to study painting. But a postgraduate fellowship from Williams (akin to the Halpingham award won by Benjamin in his novel) allowed Webb to pursue his dream of a writing career. While pining for Eve, he’d been dabbling in short fiction. Then, newly home from college, he chanced upon a bridge game in his parents’ living room. One player, the alluring wife of one of his father’s medical colleagues, sparked his imagination. As Webb told an interviewer years later, “at the sight of her my fantasy life became super-charged.” Few words passed between them, and certainly there was nothing resembling a liaison, but off he went to the Pasadena Public Library and “wrote a short plot outline to get that person out of my system. My purpose in writing has always been to work things out of me.”