Personal Life
Irwin Corey was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, New York. Poverty-stricken, his parents were forced to place their six children in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York, where Corey remained until the age of 13, when he rode the rails out to California, and enrolled himself at Belmont High School in Los Angeles. During the Great Depression, he worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and while working his way back East, became a featherweight Golden Gloves boxing champion.
Corey supported left-wing politics. "When I tried to join the Communist Party, they called me an anarchist." He has appeared in support of Cuban children, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the American Communist Party, and was blacklisted in the 1950s, the effects of which he says still linger to this day. (Corey never returned to Late Night with David Letterman after his first appearance in 1982, which he claimed was a result of the blacklist still being in effect.) During the 1960 election, Corey campaigned for president on Hugh Hefner's Playboy ticket. Corey was a frequent guest on the "Tonight Show" hosted by Johnny Carson during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
He accepted the National Book Award Fiction Citation on behalf of Thomas Pynchon for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974. He is also briefly mentioned in Chapter 22 of the Robert A. Heinlein novel Friday, but as "the World's Greatest Authority".
Corey lives in an apartment in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. In 2011 it was reported that for the last 17 years he has panhandled, with the help of a walker, for change from motorists exiting the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, which is near his apartment. He has said that the money is used to purchase medical supplies for children in Cuba.
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