Marvin Neil Simon was born the fourth of July1927 in the Bronx, New York, the second son of Irving Simon, a Jewish traveling salesman and his wife Mamie. He grew up in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. He was not a very good student and was eager to leave his all-boys high school to fight World War II. While attending New York University as an engineering student, Simon served in the Air Force Reserve where …showed first 75 words of 1609 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1609 total…into individual plays by Simon and into the canon of Simon's comedies. Page 8 01/31/2002 Zimmerman, Paul D. "Neil Simon: Up from Success." Newsweek, 2 February 1970, pp. 52-56. In this article focusing on Simon's career through the opening of Last of the Red-Hot Lovers, Simon talks about his childhood, his early years as a comedy writer, and his desire, after the success of his first plays, to portray more complex characters within plays utilizing a more sophisticated structure.