Mamet was born in Chicago to parents of Russian Jewish extraction on November 30, 1947. His father was a labor lawyer, his mother a teacher. He attended Goddard college in Vermont, returned home to Chicago and, at 24, established his St. Nicholas Theater Company, where he remains resident playwright. He set out to be an actor and director, but began writing plays because of the paucity of parts for 18-year-olds— "unless you wanted to put white shoe polish in your hair and do 'Uncle Vanya.'" He retranslated and readapted the Chekhov play instead.

Over the past two decades, he has garnered numerous awards for sympathetically recreating the Chicago proletariat underbelly with his trademark vivid, staccato language. His ear for the slippery codes of idiosyncratic vernacular was honed during a rebellious youth, a variety of jobs (estate agent, truck driver, office cleaner, carpet salesman, window cleaner, sailor) and the impact of discovering such mid-West authors as Frank Norris, Willa Cather and, above all, Theodore Dreiser.

Mamet first won recognition with his plays, "Sexual Perversity In Chicago" (filmed as "About Last Night") and "American Buffalo" (recently filmed with Dustin Hoffman and Dennis Franz). When both plays opened in New York in 1976, Mamet won the Obie Award for distinguished play writing, and "American Buffalo" was voted Best Play by the New York Drama Critics Circle. In 1978 he received the Outer Critics Circle Award for his contribution to American Theater.

In 1984 Mamet won another Best Play award from the New York Drama Critics Circle as well as the Pulitzer Prize for "Glengarry Glen Ross." The play also collected four Tony awards and was filmed in 1992. His other plays include "Edmond" and "The Cryptogram," both Obie Award winners, and "Oleanna," "Speed-the-Plow," "The Old Neighborhood," "Reunion" and "The Shawl." He has also written television plays and numerous short dramatic works, including an earlier play titled "The Spanish Prisoner" and published in the collection Goldberg Street.

Mamet has also won acclaim for his numerous screenplays— the Oscar-nominated script of "The Verdict" for Sidney Lumet; "The Postman Always Rings Twice" for Bob Rafelson; Brian De Palma's "The Untouchables;" Neil Jordan's "We're No Angels," with Robert DeNiro and Sean Penn; "Hoffa," directed by Danny De Vito and starring Jack Nicholson in the title role; "The Edge" with Anthony Hopkins and, upcoming, Barry Levinson's "Wag the Dog," with Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro. His adaptation of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" was the basis for an acclaimed ongoing staging in New York by Andre Gregory, captured on film in Louis Malle's "Vanya on 42nd Street."

"The Spanish Prisoner" is his fifth film as writer-director after his critically acclaimed debut film, "House of Games," selected to close the New York Film Festival in 1987; his gentle Mafia fable, "Things Change" (co-written with Shel Silverstein), for which Joe Montegna and Don Ameche shared Best Actor honors at the 1988 Venice Film festival; "Homicide," which opened the 1991 Cannes festival; and "Oleanna," in 1994, the sole film he has adapted and directed from one of his plays.

An indefatigable writer, Mamet has adapted two Chekhov plays, "The Cherry Orchard" and "Uncle Vanya,"penned an episode of Steven Bochco's "Hill Street Blues" TV series, written children's plays and books, numerous magazine articles, four volumes of essays and two novels. He has taught acting at his alma mater, Goddard College, The University of Chicago, Yale School of Drama and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where, in 1988, he established a traveling repertory company called the Atlantic Theater Company. He also found time to play a gambler in Bob Rafelson's movie "Black Widow."