Jonathan Leaf is a playwright and journalist based out of New York City. He is the writer of the off-Broadway play The Caterers, which was nominated for Best Full-Length Original Script of 2005-2006 in the Innovative Theater Awards.
In June 2006, he was featured in Time Out New York magazine in an article on America's most important young playwrights and compared to Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow for his "literacy and seriousness".
Leaf's follow-up to The Caterers was The Germans In Paris. Praised by The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and Broadwayworld.com, among others, the play ran in January 2007 at the Upper West Side's Arclight Theater. During the course of its four-week run, it was the highest rated show in New York according to audience surveys on the Theatermania website.
A former New York City public school teacher, Leaf has written both about education and about the arts and culture for such publications as The Weekly Standard, The New York Sun, The New Yorker, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The American and National Review. Leaf has also been a contributor and editor at the Web journal New Partisan, and he has written for The New York Press, where he served as the Arts editor.
In 2009, Leaf published his first full-length nonfiction book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties, in which he attacks popular perceptions of the 1960s as a radical decade dominated by hippies, rock music and free love.
Famous quotes containing the words jonathan and/or leaf:
“The well-cared-for woman is a parasite, and the woman who must work is a slave.”
—Cora Anderson, U.S. male impersonator. As quoted in Gay American History, part 3, by Jonathan Katz (1976)
“On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll;
On plastic clay and leathern scroll,
Man wrote his thoughts; the ages passed,
And lo! the Press was found at last!”
—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)