Murray Joseph Schisgal was born on November 25, 1926, to Abraham and Irene (née Sperling) Schisgal, in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a tailor in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Schisgal was in high school during World War II, but he quit to join the United States Navy in 1943, in which he served until 1946, earning the rank of radioman, third class. He returned to earn his high school diploma at night and attended Long Island University. He gained a bachelor of laws degree in 1953 from Brooklyn Law School and a bachelor of arts from New York’s New School for Social Research in 1959.

From the age of twenty-one, Schisgal knew that his main professional interest was in writing. His initial efforts in the world of letters were in prose fiction: more than sixty stories and three novels, none of which was immediately published. He supported himself through a variety of odd jobs, including setting pins in a bowling alley, pushing clothing racks in the garment district, and playing saxophone and clarinet in a small band. After receiving his law degree, Schisgal practiced law for two years on Delancey Street, near Greenwich Village, but he gave this up to devote more time to his writing. He then turned to teaching English while he continued to write on the side. From 1955 through 1960, he taught English at James Fenimore Cooper Junior High School in East Harlem, New York City. While teaching, he turned to writing plays.

Like his contemporary Edward Albee, Schisgal saw his first commercial production mounted in another country. While traveling to Europe to spend time writing, he succeeded in arranging for his first works, The Typists and The Tiger, to be produced by the British Drama League. After this breakthrough, Schisgal became a full-time playwright; since 1960, he has been able to practice his craft on a full-time basis.

Schisgal’s best-known work is the comedy Luv, which premiered in London in 1963 and opened in the United States in November, 1964, at the Booth Theatre in New York. Directed by Mike Nichols—a television actor and comic who was to become famous as a film director with his work in The Graduate—Luv’s three-person cast consisted of Alan Arkin, recently moved over from Second City in Chicago, and Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, two well-known personalities of the New York stage and the world of cinema. The recognition that Schisgal first gained with The Typists and The Tiger turned into financial and commercial success with the long-running Luv, and he became a fixture of the Broadway scene.

In 1975, however, disillusioned by the failure of the ambitious All over Town, Schisgal stopped writing for Broadway. He turned his attention to film and television work and received an Academy Award nomination for his work on Tootsie; he also wrote his first novel. He continued to write plays for Off-Broadway production before returning to Broadway with Twice Around the Park in 1982. He has continued to write plays, largely for European production; Popkins was produced in Paris in 1990, and Theatrical Release was performed there in 1991.