David Simon

Simon was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Dorothy Simon (née Ligeti), a homemaker, and Bernard Simon, a former journalist and then public relations director for B'nai B'rith for 20 years. Simon was raised in a Jewish family, and had a bar mitzvah ceremony. His family roots are in Russia, Belarus, Hungary, and Slovakia (his maternal grandfather had changed his surname from "Leibowitz" to "Ligeti"). He has a brother, Gary Simon, and a sister, Linda Evans, who died in 1990. Simon graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Maryland, and wrote for the school newspaper, The Tattler. In 1983, he graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park. While at college he wrote and was editor for The Diamondback, and became friends with contemporary David Mills. ==Career==

{{external media|width = 210px|float = right|headerimage= Journalism Upon leaving college, Simon worked as a police reporter at The Baltimore Sun from 1982 to 1995. Simon was hired by the Baltimore Sun for a piece he wrote about Lefty Driesell, who was then the men's basketball coach at the University of Maryland. Driesell had been extremely frustrated that one of his players was suspended from playing for sexual impropriety and called the victim, threatening to destroy her reputation if she did not withdraw her complaint. This was all done while the university administration was listening to the call, but they did nothing. Lefty Driesell was later given a 5-year contract and, in 2018, he was inducted into the ACC Hall of Fame. Simon spent most of his career covering the crime beat. A colleague has said that Simon loved journalism and felt it was "God's work". In 1988, disillusioned, Simon took a year's leave to go into the Baltimore Police Department Homicide Unit to write a book. Book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets Simon's leave of absence from The Sun resulted in his first book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991). The book was based on his experiences shadowing the Baltimore Police Department homicide unit during 1988. The book won the 1992 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime book. The Associated Press called it "a true-crime classic". Simon was nominated for a second WGA Award for Best Writing in a Drama for his work on "Finnegan's Wake" with Yoshimura and Mills (who wrote the teleplay). Simon became close to one of his subjects, drug addict Gary McCullough, and was devastated by his death while he was writing the project. During this time Burns had often faced frustration with the bureaucracy of the police department, which Simon equated with his own ordeals as a police reporter for The Baltimore Sun. Writing against the background of current events, including institutionalized corporate crime at Enron and institutional dysfunction in the Catholic Church, the show became "more of a treatise about institutions and individuals than a straight cop show." They chose to take The Wire to HBO because of their existing working relationship from The Corner. Owing to its reputation for exploring new areas, HBO was initially dubious about including a cop drama in their lineup, but eventually agreed to produce the pilot after ordering a further two scripts to see how the series would progress. Carolyn Strauss, the president of HBO entertainment, has said that Simon's argument that the most subversive thing HBO could do was invade the networks' "backyard" of police procedurals helped to persuade them. The third season "reflects on the nature of reform and reformers, and whether there is any possibility that political processes, long calcified, can mitigate against the forces currently arrayed against individuals." They recruited Homicide star and director Clark Johnson to helm the pilot episode. and later a producer for the show's second and third seasons. Simon and Pelecanos collaborated to write the episode "Middle Ground" Similar to Simon's own experience in researching Homicide Pelecanos spent time embedded with the Washington DC homicide unit to research the book. Crime novelist Dennis Lehane has also written for the series starting with the third season. Lehane has commented that he was impressed by Simon and Burns' ear for authentic street slang. Eric Overmyer was brought in to fill the role of Pelecanos as a full-time writer producer. He had previously worked with Simon on Homicide where the two became friends. Simon and Burns collaborated to write the series finale "-30-" which received the show's second Emmy nomination, again in the category Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Simon has stated that he finds working with HBO more comfortable than his experiences with NBC on Homicide and that HBO is able to allow greater creative control because it is dependent on subscribers rather than on viewing figures. Treme Simon collaborated with Eric Overmyer again on Treme, a project about musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans. Overmyer lives part-time in New Orleans, and Simon believed his experience would be valuable in navigating the "ornate oral tradition" of the city's stories. Simon also consulted with New Orleans natives Donald Harrison Jr., Kermit Ruffins, and Davis Rogan while developing the series. The show focuses on a working-class neighborhood, and is smaller in scope than The Wire. The series premiered on April 11, 2010, on HBO and ran for four seasons. Treme is named after the Faubourg Treme neighborhood in New Orleans that is home to many of the city's musicians. One of the principal characters in the pilot script runs a restaurant. Show Me a Hero In 2014, HBO greenlit production for Simon's next project Show Me a Hero, a six-hour miniseries co-written with William F. Zorzi and the episodes directed by Academy Award-winner Paul Haggis. The miniseries is an adaptation of the nonfiction book of the same name by Lisa Belkin and tells the story of Nick Wasicsko, the youngest big-city mayor in the country who is thrust into racial controversy when a federal court orders to build a small number of low-income housing units in the white neighborhoods of Yonkers, New York. Oscar Isaac stars as Wasicsko and leads a cast, which includes Catherine Keener, Jim Belushi, Bob Balaban and Winona Ryder. The miniseries premiered on August 16, 2015. The Deuce The Deuce is a 2017 drama television series set in Times Square, New York focusing on the rise of the porn industry in the 1970s-80s. Created and written by Simon along with frequent collaborator George Pelecanos, the series pilot began shooting in October 2015. It was picked up to series in January 2016. It premiered on September 10, 2017, and is broadcast by HBO in the United States. The Deuce tells the story of the legalization and ensuing rise of the porn industry in New York beginning in the 1970s and its ongoing rise through the mid-1980s. Themes explored include the rise of HIV, the violence of the drug epidemic and the resulting real estate booms and busts that coincided with the change. The Plot Against America An adaptation of Philip Roth's novel, The Plot Against America is an alternate history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey; as they watch the political rise of Charles Lindbergh, an aviator-hero and xenophobic populist, who becomes president and turns the nation toward fascism. The six-part miniseries premiered on March 16, 2020, on HBO. We Own This City A miniseries based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton. The miniseries details the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force and the corruption surrounding it. With Taylor Branch, James McBride, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Eric Overmyer. About Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, based on one of the volumes of the books America in the King Years written by Taylor Branch, specifically ''At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968.'' The project was to be produced by Oprah Winfrey, but was shelved. • The Avenue: A book with William F. Zorzi Jr., on the Baltimore drug epidemic from 1951 to late 1980s. • The Good Friday Plot: Miniseries about Abraham Lincoln and American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael W. Kauffman. The show was to be executive produced by Simon and Tom Fontana. Manhunt was later adapted by a different team as a miniseries for Apple TV+ in 2024, created by Monica Beletsky. • Capitol Hill: A collaboration with Carl Bernstein set in Capitol Hill, it examines partisanship and the role money plays in influencing national governance. The series was ordered to pilot by HBO in 2015, but has not received a subsequent season order. • Legacy of Ashes: On the Central Intelligence Agency, and would have had Anthony Bourdain and Ed Burns on the writing staff. • The Pogues: Musical project with the help of the late Philip Chevron in development at The Public Theater in New York City, with Laura Lippman and George Pelecanos, focused on the band The Pogues. • A Dry Run: The Lincolns in Spain: A historical miniseries set during the Spanish Civil War about the Abraham Lincoln and George Washington Battalions, which were composed of volunteers from the United States who wanted to help the Spanish Republic overcome fascism. Mark Johnson will be the series producer and Mediapro will be the series' production company. ==Writing process==

Simon is known for his realistic dialogue and journalistic approach to writing. He says that authenticity is paramount and that he writes not with a general audience in mind but with the opinions of his subjects as his priority. He has described his extensive use of real anecdotes and characters in his writing as "stealing life". In a talk that Simon gave to a live audience in April 2007 at the ''Creative Alliance's storytelling series, Simon disclosed that he had started writing for revenge against John Carroll and Bill Marimow, the two most senior editors at The Baltimore Sun when Simon was a reporter at the paper. Carroll left The Baltimore Sun to become editor at the Los Angeles Times'' and resigned in 2005 after budget cuts were announced. Carroll and Marimow "were fuel for 10 years of my life. ... And now, I got nothing," Simon said. Simon ended his testimony by declaring, "I don't think anything can be done to save high-end journalism." ==Political views==

Simon has described himself as a social democrat, broadly supporting the existence of capitalism while opposing "raw, unencumbered capitalism, absent any social framework, absent any sense of community, without regard to the weakest and most vulnerable classes in society", which he described as "a recipe for needless pain, needless human waste, (and) needless tragedy". He has criticized the idea of trickle-down economics. In 2013, Simon compared the global surveillance disclosures uncovered by Edward Snowden to a 1980s effort by the City of Baltimore to record the numbers dialed from all pay phones. The city believed that drug traffickers were using pay phones and pagers, and a municipal judge allowed the city to record the dialed numbers. The placement of the payphone number recorders formed the basis of The Wires first season. Simon argued that the media attention regarding the surveillance disclosures is a "faux scandal." During a November 2013 speech at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, he said that America has become "a horror show" of savage inequality as a result of capitalism run amok, and that "unless we reverse course, the average human being is worthless on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism." Simon has also spoken out publicly against crime journalist Kevin Deutsch, disputing the portrayal of Baltimore's illegal drug trade in Deutsch's book, Pill City: How Two Honor Roll Students Foiled the Feds and Built a Drug Empire. Simon has described the book as "a wholesale fabrication." During the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Simon praised Bernie Sanders for "rehabilitating and normalizing the term socialist back into American public life", but opposed some attacks against Hillary Clinton which he felt focused on her presumed motives rather than the substance of policies. ==Personal life==

In 1991, Simon married graphic artist Kayle Tucker. They had a son. The marriage ended in divorce. In 2006, Simon married best-selling Baltimore novelist and former Sun reporter Laura Lippman in a ceremony officiated by John Waters. They have a daughter, who was born in 2010. Lippman and Simon separated in 2020, divorcing in 2024. The two continue to co-parent their daughter. Simon's nephew, Jason Simon, is a guitarist and vocalist for the psychedelic rock band Dead Meadow. The band was mentioned in an episode of The Wire. Simon was the 2012 commencement speaker for the Georgetown University College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the speaker for the Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School graduation. In 2019, Simon joined several other writers in firing their agents as part of the Writers Guild of America's stand against the Association of Talent Agents after failing to come to an agreement on their "Code of Conduct". Simon's statement to the writers union was widely circulated. He had previously criticized the practice of packaging by the major talent agencies. ==Works and publications==

Commentary • • • Non-fiction books • • ==Filmography==

Producer Writer ==References==