Richard Price

Richard Price Bio

Richard Price, born October 12, 1949, is an American novelist and screenwriter whose body of work has earned wide literary and Hollywood recognition. He is best known for the novels The Wanderers (1974) and Clockers (1992), both set against the backdrop of late-20th-century urban America. Beyond fiction, Price has built a parallel career as a screenwriter for film and television, including the Academy Award-nominated The Color of Money (1986) and HBO series such as The Wire, The Night Of, and The Deuce.

Writing under the pen name Harry Brandt, Price continues to publish novels and develop television projects. He lives in Harlem, New York, with his wife, the journalist and author Lorraine Adams. Over the course of his career, he has also taught writing at several major American universities, including Columbia and New York University.

Early Life and Background

Richard Price was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of Harriet Rosenbaum and Milton Price, a window dresser. He grew up in a housing project in the northeast Bronx and has described his upbringing as that of a lower middle-class Jewish kid. The street life of 1960s New York would later supply much of the material for his fiction.

He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1967, a specialized public high school known for producing graduates in the sciences. After high school, Price went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University. He later completed a Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University and also undertook graduate work at Stanford University, formal training that helped shape his move from journalism into long-form fiction and screenwriting.

Path to Writing

Price began his writing career in journalism, contributing articles to publications such as The New York Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. That reporting experience gave him a documentary feel for urban America that became central to his later novels. His transition into fiction came with The Wanderers, a coming-of-age story set in the Bronx in 1962 and written when he was twenty-four years old.

The publication of The Wanderers in 1974 immediately established Price as a fresh voice in American fiction and led to his first screenwriting work when the novel was adapted into a 1979 film directed by Philip Kaufman. Early festival and critical attention to his fiction, combined with his growing list of magazine credits, opened the door to feature-film assignments and, eventually, to long-form television work for HBO.

Richard Price Career

Early Career (1974–1991)

Price’s first major work, the novel The Wanderers, was published in 1974 when he was twenty-four and drew on his Bronx childhood for its portrait of teenage street gangs in 1962. The book was adapted into a 1979 feature film directed by Philip Kaufman, with a screenplay by Kaufman and Rose Kaufman. Building on that early recognition, Price moved into Hollywood screenwriting with The Color of Money (1986), directed by Martin Scorsese, an adaptation of Walter Tevis’s 1984 novel for which Price received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Price balanced novels and screenplays. He wrote the Martin Scorsese-directed segment Life Lessons from the anthology film New York Stories (1989) and co-wrote the crime thriller Sea of Love (1989), both of which helped cement his reputation as a screenwriter fluent in morally complex urban stories. During this same period he also served as executive producer on the film Ethan Frome (1993).

Breakthrough (1992–2017)

The breakthrough of Price’s career came with the novel Clockers (1992), a sweeping story of the drug trade that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Spike Lee adapted Clockers into a 1995 feature film, with Price and Lee sharing screenplay credit, marking Price’s highest-profile collaboration to that point. His later novel Lush Life (2008) drew praise from critic Walter Kirn, who compared Price to Raymond Chandler and Saul Bellow, and in July 2010, a multi-venue New York City art show was inspired by the book.

In 2015, Price published the detective novel The Whites under the pen name Harry Brandt, with film producer Scott Rudin attached to a future film adaptation. That same year, his screenplay for the thriller Child 44 was released. On the television side, Price wrote for HBO’s The Wire and won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony for his work on the fifth season. He created the police drama NYC 22 in 2012, which was cancelled after one season, and went on to write the eight-part HBO miniseries The Night Of, which premiered in July 2016. The HBO series The Deuce, co-written and executive produced by Price, followed in September 2017.

Beyond his produced credits, Price wrote and conceptualized the eighteen-minute music video for Michael Jackson’s Bad and did uncredited work on the 2007 film American Gangster. Additional screenplays from this period include Mad Dog and Glory (1993), Ransom (1996), and Shaft (2000), further broadening his filmography across studio crime dramas and character-driven thrillers.

Notable Works and Milestones

Price’s signature works remain The Wanderers, Clockers, and Lush Life, alongside his screenplays for The Color of Money, Sea of Love, and Child 44, and his television work on The Wire, The Night Of, and The Deuce. His Academy Award nomination for The Color of Money stands as one of the defining milestones of his Hollywood career, and his Writers Guild of America Award for The Wire reflects his standing as a leading writer of dramatic television.

Richard Price Award Nominations

Richard Price has received nominations from some of the most respected institutions in American arts and letters. His screenplay for The Color of Money (1986) earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His novel Clockers was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

Richard Price Awards Won

Price has been honored with major recognitions for both his novels and his television writing. In 1999, he received an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he was inducted into the academy in 2009. For his writing on the fifth season of HBO’s The Wire, Price won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony.

Richard Price Family

Richard Price is the son of Milton Price, a window dresser, and Harriet Rosenbaum. He grew up in a housing project in the northeast Bronx alongside family members who shaped his early understanding of New York City life. His literary and creative pursuits have continued a family story rooted in working-class New York.

Personal Life

Price lives in Harlem in New York City. He is married to the journalist and author Lorraine Adams. Beyond his own writing, he has taught writing at Binghamton University, Hofstra University, Columbia University, Yale University, and New York University, passing along his craft to new generations of American writers.