Marsha Norman was born 21 Sep, 1947 Louisville, KY, USA. She is the daughter of a fundamentalist Methodist, Norman had a solitary childhood in Louisville, Kentucky. Her mother's religious views prohibited Norman from playing with other children and watching television and movies, and she credits her loneliness as a child as the reason she became a writer. Playing the piano, reading books, and attending the theatre were permitted to her and she saw children's plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, as well as later productions of Tennessee William's THE GLASS MENAGERIE and Archibald MacLeish's J.B., an adaptation of The Book of Job. A philosophy major at Agnes Scott College in Georgia, Norman began to work as a journalist after graduation, writing articles and reviews of books, plays, and films for the LOUISVILLE TIMES. Norman's first play, GETTING OUT (1977), resulted from a suggestion by Jon Jory, a theatre director, who asked her to write a play for the Actors' Theatre. At first she felt she had no models to follow as a playwright, but soon found she could draw on her experience working with disturbed adolescents at Kentucky Central State Hospital. This background enabled her to create a vivid portrait of a woman parolee who served an eight-year prison sentence for robbery, kidnapping, and manslaughter. GETTING OUT was voted the best new play produced by a regional theatre by the American Theatre Critics Association and appeared in a shortened version in THE BEST PLAYS OF1977-1978. After the success of this play, Norman moved to New York City because, as she said, she "needed to be in the world of living writers...I like seeing that there are some people who do what I do, who are still alive." She wrote some one-act plays for the Actors' Theatre and another full-length play, CIRCUS VALENTINE (1979), ‘NIGHT, MOTHER (1983), which won the Pulitzer Prize in addition to several other awards and four Tony Award nominations. Four years later she published her first novel, THE FORTUNE TELLER, and followed it with FOUR PLAYS (1988) and THE SECRET GARDEN (1991), a Broadway musical. Since 1994 she has served on the faculty of The Juilliard School. Awards: The Pulitzer Prize, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Hull-Warriner, and Drama Desk Awards for ‘NIGHT MOTHER (1983). Tony Award and Drama Desk awards for THE SECRET GARDEN (1992), and the John Gassner Medallion, Newsday Oppenheimer award, and the American Theatre Critics Association Citation for GETTING OUT.
