Playwright Neil Simon, known for 'The Odd Couple' and 'Barefoot in the Park,' dies at 91

Neil Simon, whose comic touch in "The Odd Couple," "Barefoot in the Park" and many other hits on stage and screen made him the most commercially successfully playwright of the 20th century, has died, according to his representative. He was 91.

From "Come Blow Your Horn" in 1961 to "45 Seconds From Broadway" in 2001, 30 of Simon's plays opened on Broadway, including five musicals for which he wrote the books. Seventeen of them ran a year or more, and many were subsequently embraced by theater's grass roots, seen year after year across the nation as staples of community theater, dinner theater and high school productions.

Though he once described writing plays as "my lifeblood" and put screenwriting a distant second, Simon adapted 18 of his plays for film or television and wrote 11 screenplays not based on his stage work. Among his original stories for film were "The Out-of-Towners" (1970) and "The Goodbye Girl" (1977). Four of his scripts were nominated for Academy Awards.

Early in his career, critical consensus pegged Simon as an insubstantial writer more interested in drawing laughs than in probing the truth of human existence. But as time went on, he pushed to deepen his plays and expose more nakedly the pain - much of it derived from his own experience - that he identified as the engine of his comedy.

Though almost never rated as