Born 30 November 1947, Mamet grew up in a Jewish enclave on Chicago's South Side. His mother, the former Leonore June Silver, was a teacher and his father, Bernard Morris Mamet, a lawyer with a penchant for semantics. He remembers his father stopping dinner-time conversation until Mamet or his sister found more precise words for what they were trying to say. After his parents' divorce in the late 1950s, Mamet lived in the Chicago suburb of Olympia Fields with his mother and attended a private school in Chicago. While still in high school, he worked as a busboy at Chicago's Second City, an improvisational comedy cabaret, which spawned such talents as Mike Nichols and Elaine May. To this experience and to his years of piano lessons, Mamet attributes his understanding of the rhythms of action and speech. During his high-school years, Mamet also worked backstage at the Hull House Theatre in Chicago. His love of writing was further encouraged by his father in whose office Mamet spent hours composing dialogue at a typewriter.
Mamet studied literature and drama at the open, experimental Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, where he received a B.A.
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