Background
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Gardner was the son of a bar owner.
cartoonist playwright graphic designer
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Gardner was the son of a bar owner.
Gardner was educated at New York"s High School of Performing Arts, Carnegie-Mellon University and Antioch College.
While a student at Antioch, he began drawing The Nebbishes. The comic strip was picked up by the Chicago Tribune and syndicated to 60-75 major newspapers from 1959 to 1961. Even before syndication, the Gardner characters were a national craze, marketed on statuettes, studio cards, barware (including cocktail napkins), wall decorations and posters.
In 1960, after "the balloons were getting larger and larger, and there was hardly any drawing left", he dropped it and began writing plays.
Gardner is best known for his 1962 play A Thousand Clowns, which ran for two years. He received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay for the successful 1965 movie adaptation.
The play was revived in 1996 and 2001. Both the 1962 play and the movie starred Jason Robards, Junior. as Murray Burns, a charming, unemployed children"s show writer, who is forced to choose between social conformity and the probable loss of custody of his 11-year-old nephew to the Child Welfare Bureau.
In 2000, Robards wrote:
I feel A Thousand Clowns is his masterpiece.
lieutenant is a real human comedy of poignancy and laughter, with all of humanity"s foibles and eccentricities. There is a great depth of love and understanding for all in this play. There are great life lessons to learn daily, which I find myself still doing.
Foreign Herb Gardner to have written this play in his early twenties is a miracle.
In 2012, a theater group in Germany came under fire for allowing a white actor to paint his face and take the part of the black character Midge Carter. Other Broadway credits include The Goodbye People (1968), Thieves (1974), and Conversations with My Father (1992).
He collaborated with Jule Styne on the ill-fated 1980 musical One Night Stand. Gardner"s autobiographical novel, A Piece of the Action, was published in 1958.
Gardner was the screenwriter and co-producer of the 1971 motion picture Who Is Harry Kellerman, and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Maine? which starred Dustin Hoffman.
Gardner made a brief screen appearance as Rabbi Pierce in the 1987 motion picture Ishtar. Gardner died in his Manhattan apartment from complications of lung disease.