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 received three Tony Awards and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for four Academy Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards. He was awarded a Special Tony Award in 1975, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991, 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, where he 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". 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. 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. 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." Simon later wrote scripts for The Phil Silvers Show, for episodes broadcast during 1958 and 1959.
Simon later recalled the importance of these two writing jobs to his career: "Between the two of them, I spent five years and learned more about what I was eventually going to do than in any other previous experience."
Simon described a typical writing session: