Biography
Leslie Epstein was born in Los Angeles in 1938 to a Hollywood family (his Father, Philip, and Uncle, Julius, wrote Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Arsenic and Old Lace, and dozens of other distinguished and witty screenplays) and began his own career in the theater. He has a doctorate in playwriting from the Yale Drama School and won the Samuel Goldwyn Award in playwriting when earning his M.A. in Theater Arts from UCLA. Lazily, he turned from playwriting when his stories and novels began to be published -- ten such books to date. One of them, San Remo Drive, describes that childhood in Southern California, and his third book, King of the Jews, is the novel from which this play has been adapted. Extraordinarily controversial when it first appeared in 1979, it has grown into a classic of Holocaust literature, never having gone out of print and existing in eleven translations. In the course of time, Mr. Epstein has been a Rhodes Scholar and a Fulbright and a Guggenheim Fellow, and has won many other awards, including two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Residency at the Rockefeller Institute in Bellagio, and an award for Distinction in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. For many years he has directed the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife, Ilene, and is the father of three children, Anya, Paul, and Theo.
