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Neil Simon is a prolific American playwright known for his New York-themed plays. He began writing at 21 and wrote for television before making his Broadway debut with Come Blow Your Horn in 1961. His most famous work, Lost in Yonkers, won a Pulitzer Prize and he has won numerous other awards throughout his career. Simon’s works often draw from his personal life, with his autobiographical trilogy being his most personal.
Neil Simon is an American playwright born in 1927. He has written a string of wildly popular plays, churning out hit after hit for Broadway and the world’s stages. Throughout his career he has won numerous awards for his plays, including multiple Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a Drama Desk Award, and many more.
Neil Simon was born in the Bronx and many of his plays are based on New York themes. He began writing scripts at the age of 21 for both television and radio and studied with many luminaries of the day, including radio writer Goodman Ace. In the 1950s, while writing comedy revues, Neil Simon and his brother Danny were spotted by Sid Caesar, who hired the pair to write for his television show, Your Show of Shows. This marked the very beginning of Neil Simon’s great moment, and his career has continued to develop rapidly from there.
In 1961, Neil Simon had his first Broadway play, Come Blow Your Horn, produced. While not particularly popular, it still ran for nearly 700 performances and established Neil Simon on Broadway. His next work, Little Me, was a musical number and was the first of his seventeen Tony nominations. A prolific writer, by 1966 Neil Simon had written five plays, four of which were running on Broadway simultaneously, quite a remarkable feat for a beginning playwright. His fourth play, The Odd Couple remains one of his most popular to date, and has been performed worldwide, and made into a film, two television series and an animated series, and received a Tony Award for Best comedy in 1965 .
In 1991 he wrote his most famous work, Lost in Yonkers. The show stars two young brothers, Jay and Arty, who have been left with their grandmother and aunt in Yonkers. Unlike many of Simon’s early works, Lost in Yonkers has little sentimentality, focusing on the trials of coming of age within a dysfunctional family environment. The play earned Neil Simon another Tony Award for Best Comedy, as well as a Drama Desk Award for Best New Comedy and the Pulitzer Prize for Playwriting. In 1993, he wrote a screen adaptation of the play, and it was made into a successful film starring Richard Dreyfuss and much of the original stage cast.
Over his long career, Neil Simon has incorporated much of his personal life into his plays, giving them a deeply real and heartfelt touch. In the years since, his works have tended even more towards the personal, with a more poignant sense of humor and an almost shocking level of honesty. A trilogy, begun in the 1980s, is Simon’s most autobiographical work, with Brighton Beach Memoirs looking at a Jewish American teenager living in a dysfunctional family, Biloxi Blues addressing the same boy dealing with anti-Semitism while he grows up to be a man, and Broadway Bound to watch him enter the world and try to make it in the difficult business of theater.
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