
“Neil Simon takes his work seriously,” President Clinton said when naming the playwright a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1995, “but he challenges us and himself never to take ourselves too seriously. Thank you for the wit and the wisdom.” The author of several Tony Award-winning plays, including The Odd Couple and Biloxi Blues, the 85-year-old Simon also wrote Lost in Yonkers, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991. In 2006, he was awarded another serious honor—the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.