Ira Levin

Born in 1929, Ira Levin grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx, where he attended the famous Horace Mann School. Upon graduating, he studied for two years at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa before returning to New York City to attend New York University. He double majored in English and Philosophy at NYU, where he participated in a television screenwriting competition during his senior year. The screenplay he wrote earned him second place in the contest, but he later sold it to NBC as an episode on the popular show “Lights Out,” which was a suspense series first made popular as a radio program. This early success hinted at Levin’s mastery when it came to writing suspenseful, unsettling stories—a skill that blossomed in his first novel, A Kiss Before Dying, which was published in 1953 and won the Edgar Award for best novel. Levin was in his early twenties at the time and had begun to consistently write for television, though he spent 1953 through 1955 serving in the Army Signal Corps. In 1955, he adapted the Mac Hyman novel No Time for Sergeants into a teleplay that later ran on Broadway to great acclaim. He went on to write the famous novels Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Stepford Wives (1972), both of which have been adapted into well-known films. After a fruitful career, he died from a heart attack while living in Manhattan in 2007.