Patrick Shanley grew up in the Bronx, the youngest of five in a blue collar Irish Catholic family. From the start, Shanley was a born troublemaker. “I was in constant fist fights from the time I was six.’’
After a stint in the marines, Shanley enrolled in NYU, graduating as valedictorian. Writing helped him to make sense of a life in which he had always felt like an outsider. The kid who got kicked out of the hot lunch program for throwing food grew up to become a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright.
‘’Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer, precisely because it’s where the money isn’t,” he says. “ Theater is too exciting to be left to dullards.’’
