Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet is one of a handful of American playwrights whose work has found almost as much success on the screen as it has on the stage. Noted for his spare, gritty work that reflects the hardened attitudes of his native Chicago and often revolves around domineering male characters and their macho posturing, Mamet has time and again spurred both discussion and controversy, inciting particularly angry reactions from feminists.
Born in Chicago on November 30, 1947, Mamet studied at Vermont's Goddard College and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre in New York. He returned to his hometown to found the St. Nicholas Theatre Company and also worked for a time as the artistic director of the famed Goodman Theatre. Mamet first earned acclaim in 1976 for a trio of Off-Off Broadway plays, The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and America Buffalo. The latter two works were later adapted for the screen, the first becoming About Last Night (1986, it was not adapted by Mamet), and the latter released in 1996 with a script by the playwright himself.
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