Race: About the Playwright David Mamet

David Mamet was born in Chicago in 1947. The son of Jewish immigrants who left Europe and arrived in the south side of Chicago where Mamet was raised with his sister, Lynn. His parents divorced, and Mamet moved with his mother to a suburb of Chicago where he grew up with his mother, stepfather, and sister. His sister, Lynn, has described their childhood homelife as generally difficult and credits it for fueling some of the rage that is depicted in a number of his early plays.

Mr. Mamet attended Goddard College in Vermont where he received a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1969. He eventually landed a teaching job at Marlboro College in Vermont where he produced his first play, Lakeboat, a story based on his service in the merchant marines.

He returned to Chicago in the 1970s and founded the St. Nicholas Theatre Company with William H. Macy. At the St. Nicholas Theatre Company Mamet wrote The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo, which was Mamet’s debut Broadway play in 1977. American Buffalo won the 1977 New York Drama Critic’s Circle prize for Best American Play.

This notice won Mamet a teaching position at Yale University. In 1984 he mounted a Broadway version of Glengarry Glen Ross, which starred Joe Mantegna, and the play won Mamet the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Race ran on Broadway in 2009 with James Spader, David Alan Grier, Kerry Washington, and Richard Thomas. Mr. Mamet also has a number of notable film and television credits to his name as he’s written and directed the films The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, Heist, and Redbelt. He wrote the screenplays for The Untouchables, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ronin, The Verdict (starring Paul Newman and Charlotte Rampling), and Wag the Dog (Starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro). The latter two films were nominated for screenplay Oscars.