Eyeglasses worn by Neil Simon

Horn-rimmed eyeglasses worn by Neil Simon in the last few decades of his life. Rounded eyeglasses of this type became associated with Simon early in his career and he continued to wear them for the rest of his life.

Marvin Neil Simon (July 4, 1927 – August 26, 2018) was one of the most significant and influential playwrights of the 20th century, In a theater, television, film, and memoir writing career across five decades, he earned four Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize for drama with Lost in Yonkers, a Golden Globe for his screenplay for The Goodbye Girl, and holds the record for the most combined Tony and Academy Award nominations. Simon won the 2006 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1983, and was the only living playwright to have a New York City theater named in his honor.

Simon’s work is notable for its humorous examination of ordinary Americans – especially Jewish Americans and New Yorkers – and the quotidian problems, joys, and frustrations of modern life. Theater critics from Walter Kerr (who called Simon “one of the finest writers of comedy in American literary history”) to John Lahr praised Simon’s creation of complex, fully-realized characters (most often “stranded bourgeois souls”) and realistic relationships and dialogue.

Beginning in the 1950s with his writing for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and his successful Broadway plays (especially Come Blow your Horn [1961], Barefoot in the Park [1963], and The Odd Couple [1963]) Simon helped create a new American style of comedy. Like the most innovative radio and television sitcoms of the era, the Jewish-inflected humor in these productions relied less on jokes and punchlines than the comical observations, revelations, and frustrations of daily life and relationships. His writing drew heavily on his life and experiences, delved into psychology, and dealt frankly with contemporary social mores and issues, though he claimed that his work was not political. “I don’t write social and political plays, because I’ve always thought the family was the microcosm of what goes on in the world,” he told a Paris Review writer in 1992. But through his characters’ dilemmas – the word he used to define his chief comic weapon – Simon engaged his audiences in conversations about weighty issues, for instance, the sexual revolution (Last of the Red Hot Lovers), alcoholism (The Gingerbread Lady), divorce and suicide (The Odd Couple), and masculinity in crisis (The Prisoner of Second Avenue).

Simon earned his greatest acclaim for four semi-autobiographical works that perhaps best represented the mixture of humor and pathos that was his signature: Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985) Broadway Bound (1986), and Lost in Yonkers (1991). These plays explored “the tangle of love, anger, and desperation that bound together – and drove apart – a Jewish working class family,” as Charles Isherwood wrote in Simon’s New York Times obituary. Simon wrote or co-wrote 49 Broadway plays, more than 20 films, contributed to numerous radio and television series, and wrote two memoirs. Among his motion picture work, The Odd Couple, The Out-of-Towners, The Heartbreak Kid, The Sunshine Boys, and The Goodbye Girl were among the most successful and have become classics.

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