Volume 34, Number 12 · July 16, 1987
Knowing S.J. Perelman
By Prudence Crowther
Sidney Joseph Perelman was born in Brooklyn on February 1, 1904, to Russian Jewish immigrants. He was an only child. The family soon moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where his father, Joseph, opened a dry-goods store, earning a parlous living that did not improve after a switch to poultry farming ('to this day I cringe at the sight of a gizzard,' Perelman wrote in a letter in 1966). He characterized his milieu as 'lower middle bourgeois.' His parents were not religious; Joseph was a socialist. In 1959, Sid told a panel of BBC interviewers:
Feature, 8279 words
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