Herb Gardner
| Herb Gardner | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Herbert George Gardner December 28, 1934 Brooklyn, New York |
| Died | September 25, 2003 (aged 68) Manhattan, New York |
| Spouse(s) |
Rita Gardner (?-?; divorced) Barbara C. Sproul (-2003; his death; 2 children) |
Herbert George Gardner (December 28, 1934 – September 25, 2003), better known as Herb Gardner, was an American commercial artist, cartoonist, playwright and screenwriter.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Gardner was the son of a bar owner. Gardner's brother, R. Allen Gardner, is a professor of comparative psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno and is famous for teaming with his wife on Project Washoe, the attempt to teach American Sign Language to a chimpanzee named Washoe.
Gardner was educated at New York's High School of Performing Arts, Carnegie-Mellon University and Antioch College. While a student at Antioch, he began drawing The Nebbishes. The comic strip was picked up by the Chicago Tribune and syndicated to 60-75 major newspapers from 1959 to 1961. Even before syndication, the Gardner characters were a national craze, marketed on statuettes, studio cards, barware (including cocktail napkins), wall decorations and posters. In 1960, after "the balloons were getting larger and larger, and there was hardly any drawing left", he dropped it and began writing plays.
Gardner is best known for his 1962 play A Thousand Clowns, which ran for two years. He received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay for the successful 1965 movie adaptation. The play was revived in 1996 and 2001. Both the 1962 play and the movie starred Jason Robards, Jr. as Murray Burns, a charming, unemployed children's show writer, who is forced to choose between social conformity and the probable loss of custody of his 11-year-old nephew to the Child Welfare Bureau. The Robards character was in part based on Gardner's friend at that time, humorist Jean Shepherd. In 2000, Robards wrote:
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