When asked by interviewer John Lahr to describe his youth in the New Yorker, Mamet remarked, "My childhood, like many people's, was not a bundle of laughs. So what? I always skip that part of the biography." A quick review of his background, however, suggests the means by which Mamet has been able to so accurately depict the anger and idiom of American men. Born in Chicago, Illinois, on November 30, 1947, he was raised in a Jewish neighborhood on the city's South Side. His father, Bernard Mamet, was a labor attorney and (as Mamet has described him) an "amateur semanticist." His mother, Lenore Silver, was a teacher. They divorced in 1958 and Mamet moved in with his mother and her new husband whose violent temper is described in Mamet's essay, "The Rake." At the age of fifteen, Mamet returned to live with his father and worked as a...