Paul Rudnick

Paul M. Rudnick (born December 29, 1957) is an American playwright, novelist, screenwriter and essayist. His plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world, and Ben Brantley, when reviewing Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told in The New York Times, wrote that, “Line by line, Mr. Rudnick may be the funniest writer for the stage in the United States today.” 2Early life Rudnick was born and raised in Piscataway, New Jersey, where his mother Selma was a publicist and his father Norman was a physicist. Rudnick attended Yale College before moving to New York City, where he wrote book jacket copy and worked as an assistant to his friend, the costume designer William Ivey Long. Rudnick began writing for magazines, including Esquire, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Spy. 2Plays and novels Rudnick’s first play was Poor Little Lambs, a comedy about a female Yale student’s attempt to join the Whiffenpoofs, an all-male singing group. The play’s cast included the young Kevin Bacon, Bronson Pinchot and Blanche Baker. Rudnick then wrote two novels: Social Disease, a satiric tale of New York nightlife in the vein of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, and I’ll Take It, which was a tribute to Rudnick’s mother and aunts and their passionate love of shopping. The Chicago Tribune called the book “absolutely hysterical” and The Boston Globe termed it “Flat out hilarious. Sort of what I imagine P. G. Wodehouse would have written after spending some time in Bloomingdale's.” In the late 1980s Rudnick moved into the top floor of a Greenwich Village brownstone which had once been the 1920s home of the actor John Barrymor