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Neil Simon

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Marvin Neil Simon (July 4, 1927 – August 26, 2018) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and author. He wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, mostly film adaptations of his plays. He has received three Tony Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and nominations for four Academy Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards. He was awarded a Special Tony Award in 1975, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2006.

Simon grew up in New York City during the Great Depression. His parents' financial difficulties affected their marriage, giving him a mostly unhappy and unstable childhood. He often took refuge in movie theaters and enjoyed watching early comedians like Charlie Chaplin. After graduating from high school and serving a few years in the Army Air Force Reserve, he began writing comedy scripts for radio programs and popular early television shows. 

Among the latter were Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows (where in 1950 he worked alongside other young writers, including Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, and Selma Diamond) and The Phil Silvers Show, which ran from 1955 to 1959. His first produced play was Come Blow Your Horn (1961). It took him three years to complete, and ran for 678 performances on Broadway. It was followed by two more successes, Barefoot in the Park (1963) and The Odd Couple (1965). 

He won a Tony Award for the latter. It made him a national celebrity and "the hottest new playwright on Broadway." From the 1960s to the 1980s, he wrote for stage and screen; some of his screenplays were based on his own works for the stage. His style ranged from farce to romantic comedy to more serious dramatic comedy. Overall, he garnered 17 Tony nominations and won three awards. In 1966, he had four successful productions running on Broadway at the same time, and in 1983 he became the only living playwright to have a New York theatre, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honor.

Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927, in The Bronx, New York City, to Jewish parents. His father, Irving Simon, was a garment salesman, and his mother, Mamie (Levy) Simon, was mostly a homemaker. Neil had one brother, eight years his senior, television writer and comedy teacher Danny Simon. He grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan, and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School when he was sixteen. He was nicknamed 'Doc,' and the school yearbook described him as extremely shy.

Simon's childhood was marked by his parents' "tempestuous marriage" and the financial hardship caused by the Depression.  Sometimes at night, he blocked out their arguments by putting a pillow over his ears. His father often abandoned the family for months at a time, causing them further financial and emotional suffering. As a result, the family took in boarders, and Simon and his brother Danny were sometimes forced to live with different relatives. 

During an interview with writer Lawrence Grobel, Simon said: "To this day, I never really knew what the reason for all the fights and battles were about between the two of them ... She'd hate him and be very angry, but he would come back, and she would take him back. She really loved him." Simon has said that one of the reasons he became a writer was to fulfill a need to be independent of such emotional family issues, a need he recognized when he was seven or eight: "I'd better start taking care of myself somehow ... It made me strong as an independent person.

I think part of what made me a comedy writer is the blocking out of some of the really ugly, painful things in my childhood and covering it up with a humorous attitude ... doing something to laugh until I was able to forget what was hurting. He was able to do that at the movies, in the work of stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy. "I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud." Simon acknowledged these childhood films as his inspiration: "I wanted to make a whole audience fall onto the floor, writhing and laughing so hard that some of them pass out." 

He made writing comedy his long-term goal and also saw it as a way to connect with people. "I was never going to be an athlete or a doctor." He began writing for pay while still in high school: At the age of fifteen, Simon and his brother created a series of comedy sketches for employees at an annual department store event. To help develop his writing skill, he often spent three days a week at the library reading books by famous humorists such as Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and S. J. Perelman.

Soon after graduating from high school, he signed up with the Army Air Force Reserve at New York University. He attained the rank of corporal and was eventually sent to Colorado. During those years in the Reserve, Simon wrote professionally, starting as a sports editor. He was assigned to Lowry Air Force Base in 1945 and attended the University of Denver from 1945 to 1946.

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