Bruce Jay Friedman Biography

American novelist and dramatist, born in the Bronx, New York City, educated at the University of Missouri. He served in the US Army, and then worked in publishing. Friedman is best known as a novelist and short-story writer, whose one successful play is the comedy Scuba Duba, produced at the New Theatre in New York in 1967. Like his novels, Scuba Duba is a witty comedy of the tensions of Jewish family life in which Harold Wonder's urbane world is shattered when his wife leaves him for a coloured lover. Friedman then brings in some of the statutory ingredients of this ethnic humour, with confrontations between the intellectual, liberal-minded Harold, his and her lover, his mother, and his psychiatrist. Friedman's novels include Stern (1962), A Mother's Kisses (1964), The Dick (1970), About Harry Towns (1974), Tokyo Woes (1985), and The Current Climate (1989). His short stories appear in volumes such as Far from the City of Class (1963), Black Angels (1966), and Let's Hear It for a Beautiful Guy (1984). His comic work of self-improvement, The Lone Guy's Book of Life, appeared in 1978.