Herb Gardner

A playwright who began as a cartoonist — his comic strip The Nebbishes was a national merchandising hit in the late 1950s — before writing A Thousand Clowns in his early twenties, a Broadway comedy about a nonconformist facing pressure to give up his nephew or his principles; he earned an Oscar nomination adapting it for film in 1965. His biggest commercial success came two decades later with I'm Not Rappaport, which won the 1986 Tony Award for Best Play.