David Alan Mamet was born on November 30, 1947 in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up near Lake Michigan in a Jewish neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. Mamet’s father was a labor lawyer, and his mother worked as a school teacher. grew up in a Jewish neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago near Lake Michigan. After his parents’ divorce, David Mamet moved to a Chicago suburb called Olympia Fields with his mother where he lived until going off to college. Mamet attended Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, beginning in 1964, and upon graduation, worked various jobs including a short time in the merchant marines. After deciding that he wanted to become an actor, Mamet joined a theater company at McGill University, and eventually, became an instructor at Marlboro College in Vermont. Mamet’s first play, Lakeboat, was staged at Marlboro college in 1970.

After one year at Marlboro, Mamet returned to his native Chicago to pursue an acting career while also holding jobs as a waiter, cab driver, and real estate salesman. Soon after, David Mamet abandoned acting and returned Goddard College as an artist-in-residence, and while at Goddard, Mamet created the St. Nicholas Theater Company, which performed the plays he had written since Lakeboat. In 1973, Mamet moved back to Chicago where over the next four years he wrote, directed, and taught at the University of Chicago and the Pontiac State Prison. Around this time, Mamet also began to receive praise and admiration for his plays such as Sexual Perversity in Chicago and American Buffalo as he began to receive awards such as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and two Obie awards. Mamet’s broadway debut came in 1977 with his production of American Buffalo at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Beginning in the 1980s, David Mamet began spending more time in the film industry as he wrote screenplays for six movies and received an Academy Award nomination. He continued to write plays such as Glengarry Glen Ross, which won him a Pulitzer Prize as well as another New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Mamet continued to write and direct in the twenty-first century including a 2013 HBO docudrama entitled Phil Spector.