Sidney Joseph Perelman was born on February 1, 1904, in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of working-class Russian Jewish immigrants with strong socialist sympathies. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Rhode Island, where his father opened a dry goods store in Providence. After the dry goods store failed, the family then purchased a chicken farm in nearby Norwood, Rhode Island. That enterprise, too, would eventually fail. In 1921, Perelman entered Brown University, where he met Nathanael West and became the editor of The Brown Jug, the campus humor magazine. Falling three credits short of his college degree after flunking Trigonometry, he left Brown to take a job as a cartoonist with Judge magazine, which also provided a venue for Perelman’s short humorous sketches. In 1929, Perelman and West’s sister, Laura, married. In 1931, accompanied by Laura, Perelman traveled to Hollywood to work on the Marx Brothers films Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. Over the next eleven years, he and Laura returned to Hollywood numerous times, often working together as screenwriters. In 1932, the Perelmans (with West) purchased an eighty-three-acre farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (Perelman gathered his humorous pieces on the exasperations of country living in his 1947 collection Acres and Pains). In all, Perelman wrote more than 450 humorous sketches and satires, many of them published in The New Yorker. His long association with the magazine began in 1930 and continued until his death. During his lifetime, his sketches and satires were gathered in almost two dozen volumes, among them Strictly from Hunger (1937), Crazy Like a Fox (1946), Listen to the Mocking Bird (1949), The Ill-Tempered Clavichord (1952), The Road to Miltown (1957), The Rising Gorge (1961), and Chicken Inspector No. 23 (1966). In addition to his short prose pieces, Perelman wrote or cowrote several Broadway plays, including Walk a Little Faster (1932), One Touch of Venus (1943), and The Beauty Part (1962). He won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), sharing the award with cowriters John Farrow and James Poe. Perelman died of a heart attack on October 17, 1979, in his apartment at the Gramercy Park Hotel.