Neil Simon's Memoirs

Neil Simon's Memoirs PDF

Author: Neil Simon

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-11-08

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 1501155008

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"Now, for the first time ever, Simon's complete life story is collected in one volume with a new introduction and afterword"--Dust jacket.

Rewrites

Rewrites PDF

Author: Neil Simon

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-10-01

Total Pages: 503

ISBN-13: 147110513X

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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. Rewritesis rich in laughter and emotion, and filled with the memories of a sometimes sweet, sometimes bittersweet life.

Brighton Beach Memoirs

Brighton Beach Memoirs PDF

Author: Neil Simon

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1995-11-01

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 0452275288

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A young boy from Brooklyn comes of age in the first play in Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical “Eugene Trilogy”—followed by Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound. Meet Eugene Jerome and his family, fighting the hard times and sometimes each other—with laughter, tears, and love. It is 1937 in Brooklyn during the heart of the Depression. Fifteen-year-old Eugene Jerome lives in Brighton Beach with his family. He is witty, perceptive, obsessed with sex, and forever fantasizing his baseball-diamond triumphs as star pitcher for the New York Yankees. As our guide through his “memoirs,” Eugene takes us through a series of trenchant observations and insights that show his family meeting life's challenges with pride, spirit, and a marvelous sense of humor. But as World War II looms ever closer, Eugene sees his own innocence slipping away as the first important era of his life ends—and a new one begins. Winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play

Rewrites

Rewrites PDF

Author: Neil Simon

Publisher:

Published: 1998-04

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13:

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The playwright recounts his painful childhood, his many influences, anecdotes from his career, and the devastating death of his wife.

Neil Simon's Proposals

Neil Simon's Proposals PDF

Author: Neil Simon

Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 9780573650994

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This elegiac memory play delightfully recalls the last time the Hines family gathered at their retreat in the Poconos. The summer of 1953 brings romantic entanglements that coalesce one idyllic afternoon; Burt Hines, mid-50's and convalescing from a second heart attack, eagerly anticipates the arrival of the ex-wife he still loves. Daughter Josie has just broken her engagement to a Harvard law student and pines for his buddy Ray, an aspiring writer with whom she once had a brief fling. Clemma, the black housekeeper at the center of the action casts a astute eye on the complications while facing with her own unresolved past.

Conversations with Neil Simon

Conversations with Neil Simon PDF

Author: Jackson R. Bryer

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2019-11-29

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1496822919

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Neil Simon (1927–2018) began as a writer for some of the leading comedians of the day—including Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons, Phil Silvers, and Jerry Lewis—and he wrote for fabled television programs alongside a group of writers that included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Sid Caesar. After television, Simon embarked on a playwriting career. In the next four decades he saw twenty-eight of his plays and five musicals produced on Broadway. Thirteen of those plays and three of the musicals ran for more than five hundred performances. He was even more widely known for his screenplays—some twenty-five in all. Yet, despite this success, it was not until his BB Trilogy—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound—that critics and scholars began to take Simon seriously as a literary figure. This change in perspective culminated in 1991 when his play Lost in Yonkers won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In the twenty-two interviews included in Conversations with Neil Simon, Simon talks candidly about what it was like to write commercially successful plays that were dismissed by critics and scholars. He also speaks at length about the differences between writing for television, for the stage, and for film. He speaks openly and often revealingly about his relationships with, among many others, Mike Nichols, Walter Matthau, Sid Caesar, and Jack Lemmon. Above all, these interviews reveal Neil Simon as a writer who thought long and intelligently about creating for stage, film, and television, and about dealing with serious subjects in a comic mode. In so doing, Conversations with Neil Simon compels us to recognize Neil Simon’s genius.

The Play Goes On

The Play Goes On PDF

Author: Neil Simon

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-12-13

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0743242289

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A revealing and heartfelt memoir of a Pulitzer Prize–winning artist finding joy and inspiration after tragedy. In his critically acclaimed Rewrites, Neil Simon talked about his beginnings—his early years of working in television, his first real love, his first play, his first brush with failure, and, most moving of all, his first great loss. Simon's same willingness to open his heart to the reader permeates The Play Goes On. This second act takes the reader from the mid-1970s to the present, a period in which Simon wrote some of his most popular and critically acclaimed plays, including the Brighton Beach trilogy and Lost in Yonkers, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Simon experienced enormous professional success during this time, but in his personal life he struggled to find that same sense of happiness and satisfaction. After the death of his first wife, he and his two young daughters left New York for Hollywood. There he remarried, and when that foundered he remarried again. Told with his characteristic humor and unflinching sense of irony, The Play Goes On is rich with stories of how Simon's art came to imitate his life. Simon's forty-plus plays make up a body of work that is a long-running memoir in its own right, yet here, in a deeper and more personal book than his first volume, Simon offers a revealing look at an artist in crisis but still able and willing to laugh at himself.