This is a biography of S.J.Perelman, an American wit and sardonic humourist who won international acclaim as a writer for the New Yorker and as a contributor to the Marx brothers' Animal Crackers and Horse Feathers and to the classic Around the World in Eighty Days for which he was awarded an Oscar and as a radio and television personality. The man is also described as an extremely complex, often troubled individual. From his poverty-stricken childhood to his days at Brown University, from his constant struggles with his work to his consuming relations with Nathaniel West (his wife's sister), this portrait is filled with unpublished anecdotes illuminating a personality at once elusive, sad tormented and uproariously funny. The author also wrote With Malice Toward All.