Neil Simon

"In his Rewrites, Simon wrote about his beginnings - growing up with longing, the early years of working in television, his first real love, his first play, his first success, his first brush with failure, and most moving of all, his first great loss."--BOOK JACKET. "The same willingness to open his heart to the reader is here in The Play Goes On as he continues the story, beginning where the earlier book left off, with the days immediately following the death of his beloved wife, Joan."--BOOK JACKET. "Simon moved quickly to work on another play, clearly an effort to keep himself busy and his mind off his loss. The period covered in The Play Goes On is rich with examples of art imitating life. In fact, Simon's most acclaimed plays - one of which won him not only Broadway's Tony Award but the Pulitzer Prize as well - were written during this time and were a look backward at his younger life. Just as he created the play Chapter Two out of his earlier experience of loss and remarriage, so out of his childhood and his years in the army and his early days as a writer he created Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, Broadway Bound, and Lost in Yonkers."--BOOK JACKET.

Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, The Goodbye Girl, The Out-of-Towners, The Sunshine Boys - Neil Simon's plays and movies have kept many millions of people laughing for almost four decades. Since Come Blow Your Horn first opened on Broadway in 1960, few seasons have passed without the appearance of another of his laughter-filled plays, and indeed on numerous occasions two or more of his works have been running simultaneously. But his success was something Neil Simon never took for granted, nor was the talent to create laughter something that he ever treated carelessly: it took too long for him to achieve the kind of acceptance - both popular and critical - that he craved, and the path he followed frequently was pitted with hard decisions. All of Neil Simon's plays are to some extent a reflection of his life, sometimes autobiographical, other times based on the experiences of those close to him. What the reader of this warm, nostalgic memoir discovers, however, is that the plays, although grounded in Neil Simon's own experience, provide only a glimpse into the mind and soul of this very private man. In Rewrites, he tells of the painful discord he endured at home as a child, of his struggles to develop his talent as a writer, and of his insecurities when dealing with what proved to be his first great success - falling in love. Supporting players in the anecdote-filled memoir include Sid Caesar, Jerry Lewis, Walter Matthau, Robert Redford, Gwen Verdon, Bob Fosse, Maureen Stapleton, George C. Scott, Peter Sellers, and Mike Nichols. But always at center stage is his first love, his wife Joan, whose death in the early seventies devastated him, and whose love and inspiration illuminate this remarkable and revealing self-portrait.

Set in 1953, Neil Simon's "flat-out funniest play in years" (Dennis Cunningham, CBS-TV) re-creates the mayhem, neuroses, nonstop gags, and constant one-upmanship of a team of brilliantly funny social misfits as they write The Max Prince Show, a weekly variety program. Among the crew are Milt, the insult artist; Ira, the hypochondriac whose dream is to have a virus named after him; and Val, a Russian emigre who takes a Berlitz course so he can curse without an accent. They are devoted to their boss, Max, a comic genius, a tyrant, and a paranoiac with a heart of gold. But his penchant for tippling and popping too many pills is growing under the pressures of a rising McCarthyism, network executives, and sponsors who want him to cut back his "too-smart" show and staff so that they can chase after the Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best audience.

An insightful drama about one woman's drive and its emotional toll on her and her family. Grandma Kurnitz has endured many crises, ranging from a harsh childhood in Germany to being a young widow with six children in a foreign country. From her life she learned to be strong, hard, and cold, and this is the lesson she tries to instill in her four remaining children. While her two teenage grandsons are in her care, the three learn the importance of being loved and loving, and the difference between living and surviving. The themes of family ties and the search for love should strike a responsive chord with many young adults.

Neil Simon continues the semiautobiographical trilogy begun with Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues. Broadway Bound begins with the efforts of Eugene Jerome and his older brother to launch a career as a comedy writing team.

A comedy built around the Jerome family during the Depression and focusing on fifteen-year-old, Eugene, preoccupied with sex and the Yankees.

Libby, a tough high-spirited adolescent ventures cross-country from New York to L.A. "to be in pictures" and to connect with her playwright father.

Brings together the texts of Simon's Chapter Two, California Suite, God's Favorite, The Good Doctor, The Sunshine Boys, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, The Gingerbread Lady, and Little Me.

Last of the Red Hot Lovers is one of the most amusing of Neil Simon?s comedies. It focuses on Barney Cashman, a forty-seven-year-old owner of a seafood restaurant who is afraid that the sexual revolution of the 1960?s is passing him by. Over the space of nine months, he invites three different women to his mother?s Manhattan apartment in an attempt to have an afternoon of extramarital sex. None of the affairs is consummated, however, and Barney decides after the last one that he would prefer a romantic afternoon with his wife, Thelma.

Neil Simon's hilarious comedy follows three brief encounters in the same suite at the famed Plaza Hotel in New York City.

Two poker buddies, one a hyper-neurotic, the other an incurable slob, suddenly find themselves bachelors again and decide to share a New York City apartment. This classic comedic play was later adapted into two motion pictures and a successful television series.