Neil Simon

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  Ken Ludwig

  KEN LUDWIG is an internationally-acclaimed playwright whose work has been performed in more than 30 countries in over 20 languages. He has had 6 shows on Broadway and 6 in the West End. He has won two Laurence Olivier Awards, two Helen Hayes Awards, the Edgar Award, the SETC Distinguished Career Award, the Edwin Forrest Award for Services to the Theatre and he is a McCarter/Sallie B. Goodman Fellow. His plays have been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Bristol Old Vic. His first play on Broadway, Lend Me A Tenor, won three Tony Awards and the New York Times called it "one of the two great farces by a living writer." His other best-known Broadway and West End shows include Crazy For You (5 years on Broadway, Tony Award Wi

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  Thornton Wilder

  Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.
  
  For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton...

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  Peter Ackerman

  Peter Ackerman is an American playwright, actor, and screenwriter best known as a co-writer of the animated movies Ice Age and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs for 20th Century Fox. He began his career as an actor in the low budget movie Astronomy of Errors (2000), and later went on to perform off-Broadway in the Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) and in Visiting Mr. Green. Following his work on the Ice Age movies, Ackerman was a writer and producer on the TV series The Americans on FX channel, and was hired in 2017 as the screenwriter of The Angry Birds Movie 2 for Sony Pictures.
  
  For the stage Ackerman's debut play, Things You Shouldn’t Say Past Midnight, was performed off-Broadway in New York and at Soho Rep in London. He was c

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  David Lindsay-Abaire

  David Lindsay-Abaire is an American playwright and lyricist. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2007 for his play, Rabbit Hole.

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  Neil LaBute

  Neil LaBute is an American film director, screenwriter and playwright.
  
  Born in Detroit, Michigan, LaBute was raised in Spokane, Washington. He studied theater at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At BYU he also met actor Aaron Eckhart, who would later play leading roles in several of his films. He produced a number of plays that pushed the envelope of what was acceptable at the conservative religious university, some of which were shut down after their premieres. LaBute also did graduate work at the University of Kansas, New York University, and the Royal Academy of London.
  
  In 1993 he returned to Brigham Young University to premier his play In the Company of Men, for which he rece

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  Anthony Shaffer

  This profile is for the British playwright. For the American military officer, see Anthony Shaffer.
  
  Anthony Shaffer is best-known as the author of the mystery-thriller play Sleuth, in addition to other plays and screenplays involving crime and mystery themes. His identical twin brother, Peter Shaffer, was also a playwright.

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  Frederick Knott

  Knott was the son of English missionaries who sent him to be educated in England. A graduate of Cambridge, his promising tennis career was cut short by WWII. He served in the British Army Artillery as a signals instructor. He eventually moved to New York, and found success with three stories he wrote for the British and American stage.

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  Brian Friel

  Brian Friel is a playwright and, more recently, director of his own works from Ireland who now resides in County Donegal.
  
  Friel was born in Omagh County Tyrone, the son of Patrick "Paddy" Friel, a primary school teacher and later a borough councillor in Derry, and Mary McLoone, postmistress of Glenties, County Donegal (Ulf Dantanus provides the most detail regarding Friel's parents and grandparents, see Books below). He received his education at St. Columb's College in Derry and the seminary at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth (1945-48) from which he received his B.A., then he received his teacher's training at St. Mary's Training College in Belfast, 1949-50. He married Anne Morrison in 1954, with whom he has four daughters and one son; they

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  George Bernard Shaw

  George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, socialist, and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama. Over the course of his life he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his plays address prevailing social problems, but each also includes a vein of comedy that makes their stark themes more palatable. In these works Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.
  
  An ardent socialist, Shaw was angered by what he perceived to be the exploitation of the working class. He wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Societ

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  Noël Coward

  Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English actor, playwright, and composer of popular music. Among his achievements, he received an Academy Certificate of Merit at the 1943 Academy Awards for "outstanding production achievement for In Which We Serve."
  
  Known for his wit, flamboyance, and personal style, his plays and songs achieved new popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work and style continue to influence popular culture. The former Albery Theatre (originally the New Theatre) in London was renamed the Noël Coward Theatre in his honour in 2006.
  

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  Margaret Edson

  Margaret Edson was born in Washington, DC in 1961. She earned degrees in history and literature, and she has been a public school teacher since 1992. Her play Wit won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999. The play has received hundreds of productions in dozens of languages, and the HBO version won the Emmy Award for best film in 2001. She lives with her family in Atlanta and teaches sixth-grade social studies at Inman Middle School.

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  Leonard Bernstein

  Leonard Bernstein was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was the first conductor born and educated in the United States of America to receive world-wide acclaim. He is perhaps best known for his long conducting relationship with the New York Philharmonic, which included the acclaimed Young People's Concerts series, and his compositions including West Side Story, Candide, and On the Town. He is known to baby boomers primarily as the first classical music conductor to make many television appearances, all between 1954 and 1989. Additionally he had a formidable piano technique and was a highly respected composer. He is one of the most influential figures in the history of American classical music, championi

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  Wallace Shawn

  Wallace Shawn, sometimes credited as Wally Shawn, is an American actor and playwright. Regularly seen on film and television, where he is usually cast as a comic character actor, he has pursued a parallel career as a playwright whose work is often dark, politically charged and controversial. He is widely known for his high-pitched nasal voice and slight lisp.

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  John Patrick

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
  
  John Patrick Goggin was an American playwright and screenwriter.
  Abandoned by his parents, he had a delinquent youth that he spend in foster homes and boarding schools. He married at 19 and got a job as an announcer at KPO Radio in San Francisco, California. After being a scriptwriter for the radio program Cecil and Sally he began writing screenplays, and later he turned to writing screenplays.
  On November 7, 1995 he committed suicide.

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  Harold Phifer

  Harold Phifer was born in the rebellious South of Columbus, Mississippi. As a kid, he worked the streets, hustled the neighbors, and bus tables at bars he didn’t belong in. After walking the stage at Caldwell High School, he went own to graduate from Mississippi State and Jackson State Universities respectively. Then he started his career as an Air Traffic Controller in Memphis, Tennessee. However, he was never at peace with himself. So, after 23 years, he left the United States and took a job as an International Contractor. Working with soldiers gave him a sense of duty and purpose. However, it all came with a price and experiences he wasn’t prepared for. As luck would have it, he got expelled out of Iraq due to the U S Military Drawdown i

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  Banu Mushtaq

  Banu Mushtaq (ಬಾನು ಮುಷ್ತಾಕ್, born 1948) is an activist, lawyer and writer from the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She writes in the Kannada language and her works have also been published in Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and, most recently, English.

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  Dean Mafako

  Dean Mafako, M.D. is an author, physician, and clinical professor of pediatrics with over 15 years of clinical and research experience. He is passionate about medicine and helping others, but also enjoys writing fiction and nonfiction novels. He writes to help others who may be dealing with difficult and traumatic life experiences to show them how their struggles can lead to personal growth and spiritual healing.

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  Margarita Barresi

  A native Puerto Rican, Margarita Barresi writes historical fiction and essays about growing up on the island. She studied public relations at Boston University and had a successful 25-year career in marketing communications. Her work has been published in several journals and anthologies, including Acentos Review, The Drowning Gull, and (mac)ro(mic).
  
  Margarita lives in the suburbs north of Boston with her husband and two post-Maria rescue cats from Puerto Rico.

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  Henrik Ibsen

  Henrik Johan Ibsen was a major Norwegian playwright largely responsible for the rise of modern realistic drama. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama." Ibsen is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors and one of the most important playwrights of all time, celebrated as a national symbol by Norwegians.
  
  His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when Victorian values of family life and propriety largely held sway in Europe and any challenge to them was considered immoral and outrageous. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many facades, possessing a revelatory nature that was disquieting to many contemporaries.
  
  Ibsen largely founded the modern stage by introducing a critical eye and free inquir

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  Noël Coward

  Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English actor, playwright, and composer of popular music. Among his achievements, he received an Academy Certificate of Merit at the 1943 Academy Awards for "outstanding production achievement for In Which We Serve."
  
  Known for his wit, flamboyance, and personal style, his plays and songs achieved new popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work and style continue to influence popular culture. The former Albery Theatre (originally the New Theatre) in London was renamed the Noël Coward Theatre in his honour in 2006.
  

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  Joseph Kesselring

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_K...

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  David Auburn

  David Auburn is an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre director. He is best known for his 2000 play Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

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  Stephen Sondheim

  Stephen Joshua Sondheim was an American musical and film composer and lyricist, winner of an Academy Award, multiple Tony Awards (seven, more than any other composer), multiple Grammy Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize. He has been described as the Titan of the American Musical.
  
  His most famous scores include (as composer/lyricist) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Assassins, as well as the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy. He was president of the Dramatists Guild from 1973 to 1981.

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  Sarah Ruhl

  Sarah Ruhl (born 1974) is an American playwright. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career.
  
  Originally, she intended to be a poet. However, after she studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University (A.B., 1997; M.F.A., 2001), she was persuaded to switch to playwriting. Her first play was The Dog Play, written in 1995 for one of Vogel's classes. Her roots in poetry can be seen in the way she uses language in her plays. She also did graduate work at Pembroke College, Oxford.
  
  In September 2006, she received a MacArthur Fellowship. The announcement of that award stated: "Sarah Ruhl, 32, playwright, New York City. Playwright

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  Arthur Miller

  Works of American playwright Arthur Asher Miller include Death of a Salesman (1949), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Crucible (1953).
  
  
  This essayist, a prominent figure in literature and cinema for over 61 years, composed a wide variety, such as celebrated A View from the Bridge and All My Sons , still studied and performed worldwide. Miller often in the public eye most famously refused to give evidence to the un-American activities committee of the House of Representatives, received award for drama, and married Marilyn Monroe. People at the time considered the greatest Miller.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_...
  

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  Tennessee Williams

  Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth.
  
  Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not ap

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  Sam Shepard

  Sam Shepard was an American artist who worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. His many written works are known for being frank and often absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern American west. He was an actor of the stage and motion pictures; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.

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  David Mamet

  David Alan Mamet is an American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. His works are known for their clever, terse, sometimes vulgar dialogue and arcane stylized phrasing, as well as for his exploration of masculinity.
  
  As a playwright, he received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).
  
  Mamet's recent books include The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and anti

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  Oscar Wilde

  Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
  Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and Joh

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  William Inge

  Dramas of American playwright William Motter Inge explored the expectations and fears of small-town Midwesterners; his play Picnic (1953) won a Pulitzer Prize.
  
  Works of this novelist typically feature solitary protagonists, encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, Broadway produced a memorable string. Inge rooted his portraits of life and settings in the heartland.
  

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  Sam Shepard

  Sam Shepard was an American artist who worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. His many written works are known for being frank and often absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern American west. He was an actor of the stage and motion pictures; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.

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  Lillian Hellman

  Lillian Florence "Lilly" Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American dramatist and screenwriter famously blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–52.
  
  Hellman was praised for sacrificing her career by refusing to answer questions by HUAC; but her denial that she had ever belonged to the Communist Party was easily disproved, and her veracity was doubted by many, including war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and literary critic Mary McCarthy.
  
  She adapted her semi-autobiographical play The Little Foxes into a screenplay which received an Academy Award nomination in 1942.
  
  Hellman was romantically involved with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Ham

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  Dawn Filos

  Dr. Dawn Filos grew up in New Jersey in a family of eccentric animal lovers, preparing her for a lifelong career spent with like-minded pet people. She was a veterinarian in Pennsylvania for over thirty years. After retiring, she realized a decades-long dream to add “pet portraitist” to her list of talents; she also blogs at drdawnthepetvet.com. She now splits her time between Scottsdale, Arizona, and East Hampton, New York, where she pursues her art and enjoys outdoor activities such as biking, hiking, and spending time at the beach.

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  Arthur Laurents

  Arthur Laurents was an American playwright, librettist, stage director, and screenwriter. His credits included the stage musicals West Side Story and Gypsy and the film The Way We Were.

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  Beth Henley

  Elizabeth Becker "Beth" Henley is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actress. Her play Crimes of the Heart won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the 1981 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play, and a nomination for a Tony Award.

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  Joseph Kesselring

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_K...

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  A.R. Gurney

  A.R. Gurney was an American playwright and novelist.

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  David Auburn

  David Auburn is an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre director. He is best known for his 2000 play Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

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  George S. Kaufman

  People note American playwright George Simon Kaufman for many collaborations, including Dinner at Eight (1932) with Edna Ferber and You Can't Take It with You (1936) with Moss Hart.
  
  This theatre director, theatre producer, humorist, and drama critic, known as "the great collaborator," wrote very few plays alone.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_...
  

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  Robert Harling

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
  
  Robert Henry Harling was a British typographer, designer, journalist and novelist.

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  Reginald Rose

  Reginald Rose (December 10, 1920 – April 19, 2002) was an American film and television writer most widely known for his work in the early years of television drama. Rose's work is marked by its treatment of controversial social and political issues. His realistic approach helped create the slice of life school of television drama, which was particularly influential in the anthology programs of the 1950s.
  Born in Manhattan, Rose attended Townsend High School and briefly attended City College (now part of the City University of New York) before serving in the U.S. Army in 1942-46, where he became a first lieutenant.
  Rose was married twice, to Barbara Langbart in 1943, with whom he had four children, and to Ellen McLaughlin in 1963, with whom he

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  William Inge

  Dramas of American playwright William Motter Inge explored the expectations and fears of small-town Midwesterners; his play Picnic (1953) won a Pulitzer Prize.
  
  Works of this novelist typically feature solitary protagonists, encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, Broadway produced a memorable string. Inge rooted his portraits of life and settings in the heartland.
  

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  Thomas Middleton

  Thomas Middleton (1580 – 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most noteworthy and distinctive of Jacobean dramatists.

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  Trey Parker

  Randolph Severn "Trey" Parker III is an American animator, screenwriter, film director, voice actor, actor and Academy Award nominated lyricist. He is most noted as one of the creators of the animated series South Park along with Matt Stone.

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  Wendy Wasserstein

  Wendy Wasserstein was an award-winning American playwright and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She was the recipient of the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

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  Joseph Stein

  Born in New York City to Jewish parents, Charles and Emma (Rosenblum) Stein, who had immigrated from Poland, Stein grew up in the Bronx. He graduated in 1935 from CCNY, with a B.S. degree, then earned a Master of Social Work degree from Columbia University in 1937. He began his career as a psychiatric social worker from 1939 until 1945, while writing comedy on the side.
  
  A chance encounter with Zero Mostel led him to start writing for radio personalities, including Henry Morgan, Hildegarde, Tallulah Bankhead, Phil Silvers, and Jackie Gleason. He later started working in television for Sid Caesar when he joined the writing team of Your Show of Shows that included Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Neil Simon.

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  Frances Goodrich

  Frances Goodrich was an American actress, dramatist, and screenwriter, best known for her collaborations with her partner and husband Albert Hackett. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama with her husband in 1956 for The Diary of Anne Frank which had premiered the previous year.

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  Aaron Sorkin

  Aaron Benjamin Sorkin is an American screenwriter, producer and playwright, whose works include A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, Sports Night and The Farnsworth Invention.
  
  After graduating from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Musical Theatre in 1983, Sorkin spent much of the 1980s in New York as a struggling, largely unemployed actor. He found his passion in writing plays, and quickly established himself as a young promising playwright. His stageplay A Few Good Men caught the attention of Hollywood producer David Brown, who bought the film rights before the play even premiered.
  
  Castle Rock Entertainment hired Sorkin to adapt A Few Good Men for the big screen. The movie, directed by Rob Reiner,

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  Matei Vişniec

  From an early age, Matei Vişniec discovered literature as a space dedicated to freedom. He draws his strengths from Kafka, Dostoevsky, Poe, Lautréamont. He loves the Surrealists, the Dadaists, absurd and grotesque theatre, surrealist poetry, fantastic literature, magical realism, even the realist Anglo-Saxon theatre. He loves everything except Socialist Realism.
  
  Vişniec studied philosophy at Bucharest University and became an active member of the so-called Eighties Generation, who left a clear stamp on the Romanian literature. He believes in cultural resistance, and in literature’s capacity to demolish totalitarianism. Above all, Matei Vişniec believes that theatre and poetry can denounce manipulation through "great ideas", as well as brainw

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  Archibald MacLeish

  American poet Archibald MacLeish won a Pulitzer Prize for Conquistador in 1932, served as librarian of Congress from 1939 and as assistant secretary of state from 1944 to 1945, and won again for Collected Poems 1917-1952 and the verse play J.B. (1958).
  
  The modernist school associates this writer. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
  

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  Edward Bond

  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bond

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  Alan Ayckbourn

  Sir Alan Ayckbourn is a popular and prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-three full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967. Major successes include Absurd Person Singular (1975), The Norman Conquests trilogy (1973), Bedroom Farce (1975), Just Between Ourselves (1976), A Chorus of Disapproval (1984), Woman in Mind (1985), A Small Family

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  Mark Jenkins

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

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