Richard Price (writer) facts for kids

Richard Price (born October 12, 1949) is an American writer who creates novels and screenplays for movies and TV shows. He is well-known for his books like The Wanderers (1974), Clockers (1992), and Lush Life (2008). Price's stories often show what urban America was like in the late 1900s in a very real way, earning him lots of praise. Many of his novels take place in a made-up city called Dempsy in New Jersey.

Price has also written for popular TV dramas such as The Wire, The Outsider, The Night Of, and The Deuce. He was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing the movie The Color of Money (1986), which was directed by Martin Scorsese.

Early Life and Education

Richard Price was born in the Bronx, New York City. His mother was Harriet (Rosenbaum) and his father was Milton Price, who worked as a window dresser. He grew up in a working-class Jewish family in a housing project in the northeast Bronx.

He went to the Bronx High School of Science and graduated in 1967. After high school, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University. He also studied at Stanford University.

Career as a Writer

Price's first novel was The Wanderers, published in 1974. He wrote this coming-of-age story, set in the Bronx in 1962, when he was just 24 years old. The book was later made into a movie in 1979.

His novel Clockers, released in 1992, was nominated for a major book award called the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1995, this book also became a movie directed by Spike Lee. Price and Lee worked together on the movie's script.

In 2008, Price published Lush Life. A famous reviewer, Walter Kirn, said Price's writing was as good as well-known authors like Raymond Chandler and Saul Bellow. A few years later, an art show in New York City was even inspired by Lush Life.

Richard Price also wrote a detective novel called The Whites using the pen name Harry Brandt. This book came out in 2015. There are plans to turn The Whites into a movie.

Screenplays for Movies and TV

Price has written many screenplays for films. Besides The Color of Money (1986), which earned him an Oscar nomination, he wrote for Life Lessons (part of New York Stories) (1989), Sea of Love (1989), Mad Dog and Glory (1993), Ransom (1996), and Shaft (2000). He also wrote the script for the movie Child 44, released in 2015. He even helped with the script for American Gangster (2007) without being officially credited.

Beyond movies, Price has written for several popular TV series. He wrote for the HBO show The Wire and won an award for his work on its fifth season. In 2012, he created a police drama series called NYC 22, though it only lasted one season.

His eight-part HBO miniseries The Night Of started in July 2016. Another HBO series, The Deuce, which he co-wrote and helped produce, premiered in September 2017. In 2020, he was the main writer and producer for the HBO miniseries The Outsider, which was based on a novel by Stephen King.

Sometimes, Richard Price even appears in small roles in the movies he writes.

He has also written articles for well-known magazines and newspapers like The New York Times, Esquire, and The New Yorker. He has taught writing at several universities, including Columbia University and New York University.

Awards and Recognition

In 1999, Richard Price received an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He became a member of this Academy in 2009.

Personal Life

Richard Price lives in Harlem in New York City. He is married to Lorraine Adams, who is also a journalist and author.

See also

In Spanish: Richard Price (escritor) para niños