Mel Gussow

Biography Gussow was born in New York City and grew up in Rockville Centre, Long Island. and Middlebury College, where he served as editor of The Campus, and graduated in 1955 with a BA degree in American literature. He earned an MA from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1956.

Gussow was a writer for the Army newspaper in Heidelberg, Germany, where he was stationed for two years. including a series of four which were considered "conversations" with playwrights Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. Times arts reporter Jesse McKinley notes that Gussow's interview collections became "staples of college drama curriculums and the libraries of gossip-loving theater fans".

Gussow was married to Ann, who survived him, along with their son Ethan, who married Susan Baldomar in 1998.

Death Gussow died on April 29, 2005, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital from bone cancer at the age of 71. He 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.

In 2008, 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.

Archive The papers and audio/video recordings of Mel Gussow were gifted to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 2009. The extensive collection of over 200 boxes consists of article and manuscript drafts, interview notes and transcripts, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, subject files, clippings, and published material. More than 900 sound recordings of Gussow's interviews with actors, playwrights, writers, and directors are held in the Ransom Center's Sound Recordings Collection. In 2018, the Ransom Center began releasing the interviews online as part of their digital collections.