The Go-Between (1971 film) envisaged Alec Guinness and Margaret Leighton in the leads and employed Nancy Mitford to write a script. L.P. Hartley later claimed Korda had no real intention to make a film of the book - he kept the rights hoping to re-sell them at a profit. Hartley says "I was so annoyed when I heard of this that I put a curse on him and he died, almost the next morning." Joseph Losey was interested in filming the novel. He tried to get financing for a version in 1963 after "The Servant" and says Pinter wrote "two thirds of a script".
Death of the novel the "death of the novel" were José Ortega y Gasset, who wrote his "Decline of the Novel" in 1925 and Walter Benjamin in his 1930 review "Krisis des Romans" (Crisis of the Novel). In the 1950s and 1960s, contributors to the discussion included Gore Vidal, Roland Barthes, and John Barth. Ronald Sukenick wrote the story "The Death of the Novel" in 1969. In 1954, Wolfgang Kayser argued that the death of the narrator would lead to the death of the novel - a view that has since been contested by many people. Meanwhile, Alain Robbe-Grillet argued that the novel would