“I hate jokes,” Neil Simon once wrote. This despite his being the most successful comedy writer and playwright of the 20th century, and perhaps ever. The man who cracked up Broadway audiences, moviegoers, and TV viewers for more than 60 years, claimed he never wrote a joke but rather, made a practice of pushing the tragic until it became funny. “I’ve always felt, and I still do, that every play I write is a drama that has its comic moments,” he said in 1994. He wrote 34 of those laughter-through-tears plays, 25 movies, and countless hours of television before his death on August 26 at 91.

It may surprise fans of Simon’s Brighton Beach trilogy that he didn't actually grow up in Brooklyn like alter ego Eugene Morris Jerome. In fact, Marvin Neil Simon was born in the Bronx on July 4, 1927, and grew up in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan. Like Eugene, Simon spent his childhood in poverty in New York during the Depression, with a fractious Jewish family and a smart big brother (Danny Simon, who, like Stan Jerome in Broadway Bound, would become his kid brother’s first comedy-writing partner). From an early age, Simon learned to cope with pain by turning it into comedy; his lifelong nickname “Doc” came from his childhood gag of imitating the family physician.

Simon spent a year at New York University before enlisting in the Army Air Corps Reserve. As World War II drew to a close, Simon served, first in Biloxi, Mississippi (as in Biloxi Blues), and then in Denver, Colorado. He landed his first professional writing job as a sports editor for an Army paper and even studied for a year at the University of Denver before returning to New York.

Back in Manhattan, Neil and Danny wrote for radio and TV comics before getting their big breaks as part of the legendary writing team behind Your Show of Shows, Sid Caesar’s groundbreaking sketch-comedy TV series. The Simons worked alongside such fellow future luminaries as Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, and Mel Brooks (one of Simon’s three all-time favorite writers, along with Dickens and Shakespeare, he later told Vanity Fair). Forty years later, Simon would immortalize Caesar’s writers’ room in the play and TV movie Laughter on the 23rd Floor as a competitive, zany graduate school for comedy writers. After applying the lessons he learned there to Phil Silvers’ Sgt. Bilko and The Garry Moore Show, Simon decided to leave television for Broadway.

It took him three years to complete his first play, Come Blow Your Horn (1961), whose characters—a naive young man, his suave big brother, and their shrill mother and father—were clearly inspired by Neil, Danny, and their parents. The show was a Broadway success, leading to even bigger hits Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. The 1965 comedy about two divorced men, fussy Felix Unger and slovenly Oscar Madison, sharing an apartment, won Simon his first Tony and became his most familiar and enduring work. It spawned a hit 1968 movie (and a sequel 30 years later), the beloved 1970-75 sitcom, and numerous revivals and reboots (most recently, the 2015 sitcom starring Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon).

In 1966, Simon became the first playwright to have four shows on Broadway at once. Over the next few years, he expanded into musicals (Sweet Charity, Promises, Promises), screenplays (The Out-of-Towners), and even uncredited script-doctoring of other playwrights’ shows (notably, A Chorus Line).

Dancer Joan Baim, Simon’s wife of 20 years , died of breast cancer in 1973. Typically, he channeled his pain and grief into his plays, including The Good Doctor, the Job-inspired God’s Favorite, and Chapter Two. His own second chapter came with his 10-year marriage to actress Marsha Mason, who became his frequent leading lady, most memorably, in the 1977 film The Goodbye Girl and in 1979’s screen adaptation of Simon’s play Chapter Two, inspired by the couple’s own marriage shortly after Baim’s death.

Indeed, Simon’s work was often autobiographical, drawing either directly on incidents from his life or on Jewish middle-class life in New York in general. Critics sometimes knocked him for writing glib characters, people who were funnier on the stage than they might be in real life. Which was a backhanded way of praising his ear for dialogue and his knack for mixing humor and pathos. His plays and screenplays were almost always about divorce, death, or other forms of abandonment. His characters would, when pushed to dramatic extremes, find catharsis through comic arias, releasing their pent-up frustrations in long, hilarious rants. “I find that what is most poignant is often most funny,” Simon told James Lipton in 1992.

In 1983, eight years after Simon earned a special Tony for his contributions to the stage, he received the ultimate Broadway accolade and became the first living playwright to have a Broadway theater named after him. Fittingly, the first production at the newly dubbed Neil Simon Theater was his own Brighton Beach Memoirs, the first of three alliteratively titled plays about Eugene Jerome, his most autobiographical character. (Simon was inspired by the brief period in his youth when he lived with cousins in the seaside community of Far Rockaway, Queens, “but Far Rockaway Memoirs is not a good title.”) The play won Simon his second competitive Tony. His third came for 1991’s Lost in Yonkers, a dark but occasionally funny tale about two brothers’ Dickensian childhood in the 1940s. Besides the Tony, it won Simon the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Finally, Simon had critical respect as a serious playwright to go with his commercial success.

In addition to his 17 Tony nominations, Simon earned four Oscar nominations, for his screenplays to The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, The Goodbye Girl and California Suite. He also earned four Emmy nods—two for his work on Caesar’s team, and two for TV adaptations of his plays (Broadway Bound and Laughter on the 23rd Floor).

Simon was married five times, to four different women: Baim, Mason, actress Diane Lander (twice), and finally, actress Elaine Joyce. He had three daughters, fathering two by Baim and adopting Lander’s daughter from a previous relationship.

The last of Simon’s plays to make it to Broadway was 2005’s Oscar and Felix: A New Look at the Odd Couple, an update of his 40-year-old hit with more topical references. Still, it seems, he never stopped putting pen to paper. He once suggested his epitaph should read, “Ssshh, he’s writing.”