Melvyn Hayes "Mel" Gussow was an American theater critic, movie critic, and author who wrote for The New York Times for 35 years.
10 Facts About Mel Gussow
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Mel Gussow earned an MA from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1956.
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Mel Gussow was a writer for the Army newspaper in Heidelberg, Germany, where he was stationed for two years.
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Mel Gussow was hired by Newsweek, where he became a movie and theater critic.
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Mel Gussow joined the New York Times in 1969 and over his 35-year career wrote more than 4,000 of the newspaper's reviews and articles.
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Mel Gussow authored eight books, including a series of four which were considered "conversations" with playwrights Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard.
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Mel Gussow was married to Ann, who survived him, along with their son Ethan, who married Susan Baldomar in 1998.
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Mel Gussow died on April 29,2005, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital from bone cancer at the age of 71.
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Mel Gussow had kept working until just three weeks before his death, writing at that time an obituary along with New York Times colleague Charles McGrath of Canadian-born Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Saul Bellow.
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In 2008, Mel Gussow was inducted posthumously into the American Theater Hall of Fame at the same time as actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein, the actors John Cullum, Lois Smith and Dana Ivey, the director Jack O'Brien, the playwright Peter Shaffer, and the librettist Joseph Stein.