Simon’s first play, Come Blow Your Horn, took him three years to complete and ran for 678 performances on Broadway. He quit this job when he and his brother, Danny Simon, began to have success writing comedy sketches for radio and early television shows, such as Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and The Phil Silvers Show.

He attended New York University and the University of Denver before joining the United States Army Air Force Reserve where he wrote for a camp newspaper in Colorado.Īfter his discharge, Simon took a job as a clerk in Warner Brother’s New York office mailroom. Neil Simon was born in 1927 in the Bronx borough of New York City and grew up in the Washington Heights neighbourhood at the northern tip of Manhattan. He weaves comedy with drama in a way that audiences can understand and identify with. Simon’s talent is in taking accessible, relatable characters, giving them realistic dialogue and placing them in identifiable situations that explore universal subjects such as sibling rivalry, marital conflicts, adolescence and the fear of getting old. When he followed those comedy-dramas with Lost in Yonkers in 1991, Simon received the Pulitzer Prize. His autobiographical trilogy of plays – Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound – which told the stories of his childhood, his Army years and his early career as a television writer showed a dimension to Simon’s writing that caused critics to take some notice of his work. Despite the fact that he had a string of huge box office hits such as The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park and Promises, Promises in the 1960s, Neil Simon was not really taken seriously as a playwright until the 1980s when he started writing about his own life.

Neil simon