Twins Peter Levin and Anthony Shaffer were born to Jack and Reka Fredman Shaffer in Liverpool. Anthony is also a novelist and playwright, best know for his play Sleuth (1970). Nevertheless, Anthony, who has pursued law, advertising, and television, has not treated the stage as his principal vocation. In their mid twenties the brothers collaborated on the writing of three mystery novels, using at first the combination pseudonym Peter Antony.
Peter attended St. Paul's School in London, from which he was graduated in 1944. He then served as a conscript coal miner until 1947, when he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. After he received his B.A. degree in 1950, he felt the need to set out on his own and, without any prospect of employment, went to New York City. He later looked back on this period as two and a half years of "exile"—an "unreal period," he says. "I'm not proud of my life in those days." While in New York he worked at Doubleday Book Shop and in the acquisitions department of the New York Public Library. Later, as a successful dramatist he entered into an ardent love affair with New York City and in 1980 made it his home, but those early years were not pleasantly memorable ones.
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