| Richard Price | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 12 1949 The Bronx, New York City, United States |
| Occupation | Novelist, screenwriter, journalist |
| Nationality | American |
| Debut works | The Wanderers |
Richard Price (born October 12, 1949 in the Bronx, New York) is an American novelist and screenwriter. His books explore the urban world in a gritty, realistic manner that has brought him considerable literary acclaim. A self-described "middle class Jewish kid",[1] Price grew up in a housing project in the northeast Bronx. He is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, has a Bachelor's degree from Cornell University, and an MFA from Columbia. He also did graduate work at Stanford.
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Novelist and screenwriter
Price has written seven novels. His first was The Wanderers (1974), a coming-of-age story set in the Bronx in 1962, written when Price was 24 years old. It was adapted into a movie in 1979 by director Philip Kaufman. Price's other novels include Bloodbrothers (1976), Clockers (1992), Freedomland (1998), and Samaritan (2003) and others. He also has written numerous screenplays, of which the best known are The Color of Money (1986) for which he was nominated for an Oscar, Sea of Love (1989), Mad Dog and Glory (1992), Ransom (1996), and others. He also writes for the HBO series The Wire. He is often featured in cameo roles in the films he writes. Price has written for The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, The New Yorker, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone and other publications. He lives in New York City with his family and has taught writing at Columbia, Yale, and New York University (NYU). In 1999, Price received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Price was one of the first people interviewed by Terry Gross on her show Fresh Air when it went national in 1987.
Clockers
Clockers is probably his most popular recent novel. It has been praised for its humor, suspense, dialogue and characterizations. It was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Clockers was made into a movie in 1995 by Spike Lee; they share writing credits for the screenplay which was nominated for an Academy Award.
See also
References
- ^ Richard Price, "The Fonzie of Literature", in The New York Times Book Review, October 25, 1981
