Richard Hoffman - Neil Simon collection

Brooklyn-based theater collector and book dealer Richard Hoffman built a number of literary collections around American playwrights over a period of many years.

Hoffman has said that he entered the United States Army in the 1950s as an actor and left as a writer. His military experience led to an assignment to create a television program titled "Your Army in View," which consisted of interviews and live drama. After his discharge from the service in 1955, Hoffman taught in the drama department of The City University of New York. During this period he was awarded a Eugene O'Neill fellowship for playwriting. He also began to seriously collect rare books and first editions of contemporary American dramatists, notably the playwrights Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Neil Simon. Hoffman's interest in collecting first editions led to his career as an antiquarian book dealer.

American playwright Neil Simon has emerged as one of the twentieth century's most popular and commercially successful American writers of stage comedies.

His best known comedies include Barefoot in the Park (1963), The Odd Couple (1965), Plaza Suite (1968), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971), and The Sunshine Boys (1972). Simon's more serious works, however, including his autobiographical trilogy, Brighton Beach Memoirs (1982), Biloxi Blues (1984), and Broadway Bound (1986), have earned him respect as a serious dramatist. Many of Simon's plays have been successfully adapted for the screen, including Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Odd Couple (1968), and The Sunshine Boys (1975).

Simon was born July 4, 1927, in the Bronx, New York, a setting that often recurs in his work. He began his career co-writing comedy sketches for radio with brother Danny Simon in the 1940s. During the 1950s the pair wrote for television personalities such as Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, and Jackie Gleason, occasionally working with writers Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. The brothers also co-wrote the early Broadway success Come Blow Your Horn (1959).

Simon has received numerous awards and honors during his career, including Emmy awards for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows (1957) and The Phil Silvers Show (1959); and Antoinette Perry awards (the "Tony") for The Odd Couple (best playwright, 1965), for Biloxi Blues (best drama, 1985), and for Lost in Yonkers (best play, 1991). Simon received a special Tony Award for overall contributions to the theater in 1975; and Academy Award nominations for The Odd Couple (1968) and California Suite (1978). The Sunshine Boys (1975) and The Goodbye Girl (1977) received Academy Award nominations as well as nominations for Golden Globe awards. Simon was honored with the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1983 for Brighton Beach Memoirs and with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991, for Lost in Yonkers .

"Neil Simon."Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Reproduced inGale Biography In Context, accessed November 5, 2010.