NORA EPHRON Biography - Writers

 
 

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NORA EPHRON

Nora Ephron, acclaimed essayist, novelist, screenwriter and director was born       
May 19, 1941 New York City. She is the daughter of screenwriting team, Pheobe       
and Henry Ephron, who wrote classic screenplays such as, There's No Business         
Like Show Business, What Price Glory and Desk Set. She is the oldest of four         
sisters, Delia, Amy and Hallie. The Ephrons were a family that valued verbal         
jousting, and in an article in Vanity Fair one Ephron sister compared the family     
dinner table to the Algonquin Round Table. Ephron grew up in a household where       
both parents abused alcohol, but she has never let her sometimes difficult           
childhood defeat her.                                                               
Ephron graduated from Wellesley in 1962 with a degree in journalism, and became     
a reporter for the New York Post. In her autobiographical speech, Adventures         
Screenwriting, Ephron reveals that in college all she could think about was         
going to New                                                                         
York and becoming a journalist. She became one of the counrty's best known           
journalists with her work in Esquire, New York Times Magazine and New York           
Magazine. Two collections of her essays, Crazy Salad and Scribble, Scribble were     
bestsellers, along with her novel, Heartburn, an account of the breakup of her       
marriage. Ephron was married to writer, Dan Greenburg before marrying Watergate     
journalist, Carl Bernstein. The couple had two sons, Jacob, 21 and Max, 20. It       
was the breakup with Bernstein that prompted her novel Heartburn. In 1987,           
Ephron married Nicholas Pileggi, a journalist and screenwriter. He wrote             
Wiseguys, which later became Goodfellas. Ephron lives on the Upper West Side of     
Manhattan with her husband.