The Odd Couple | Author Biography

Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927, in the Bronx, New York, the younger son of a father who sold cloth fabric to the dress manufacturers in Manhattan's garment district. At the age of fifteen Simon teamed with his older brother Danny to write comedy sketches for the annual employee party of a Brooklyn department store; their success in this endeavor convinced Simon that he wanted to be a comedy writer. He and Danny eventually wrote sketches for popular radio and television shows, but the partnership split in 1954 and Neil went on to write for television comedians like Sid Caesar, Garry Moore, Phil Silvers, Red Buttons, and Jerry Lewis.

Neil Simon in 1988
Neil Simon in 1988

Though successful enough to earn two Emmy Awards for television writing in 1957 and 1959, Simon found writing for television unfulfilling and in the fall of 1957 began working, in his spare time, on his first play. Come Blow Your Horn, based on his relationship with Danny and their parents, took him three years to write, and he went through twenty-two completely different versions. When the finished Come Blow Your Horn finally appeared on Broadway in 1961, however, its success launched Simon's playwriting career. His second comedy, Barefoot in the Park (1963), was based on the life he and his first wife, Joan Baim, had lived in a small apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village. With a young Robert Redford in one of the lead roles this comedy was even more successful than his first. In his third and most famous comedy, The Odd Couple, Danny served as the model for the meticulous Felix Ungar. By all standards, the play was an enormous success. By the mid-1960s Neil Simon was rich, successful, and very famous. He was so prolific with his comedy hits in the late 1960s and early 1970s that he sometimes had as many as four shows running simultaneously on Broadway.

In 1973, Joan, Simon's wife of twenty years, died of cancer. Simon subsequently married actress Marsha Mason, who would star in several productions of his work. His Chapter Two (1977) was based on Simon's complex emotional response to Joan's death and his second marriage. While still a comedy, this play represents a turning point in Simon's career, introducing more serious shadings to his palette. Many of his subsequent plays adopted this new pattern and from 1983 to 1986 a trilogy of such autobiographical plays—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound—won Simon greater praise from critics. In the 1990s, his fourth decade of playwriting, Simon's success continued, and in 1996 he published the first half of his memoirs, Rewrites, which covers the period from his birth to the reception of Chapter Two.