David Mamet (Chicago, 1947) is an American playwright, director, and screenwriter. He graduated from Goddard College in Vermont and studied at the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theater in New York. Starting with an acting exercise, Mamet created a fascinating syntax composed of half-expressed thoughts and rapid mood shifts for his screenplays. Mamet's early works, Duck variations (Variations on the duck, 1971) and Sexual perversion in Chicago (Jefferson Award, 1974), were produced Off-Broadway in 1975 and quickly established his reputation as a writer of the so-called New Realism. Mamet received the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for GlengarryGlen Ross.