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Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, best-selling author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, women and sex, and who later produced a series of humorous children\u2019s books, died on Monday in the Bronx. He was 87.<\/p>\n
His death, at a hospice facility, was caused by worsening complications of a stroke he had a year ago, his son, Zack O\u2019Malley Greenburg, said.<\/p>\n
Mr. Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his \u201cHow to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual,\u201d a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother.<\/p>\n
\u201cNever accept a compliment,\u201d Mr. Greenburg advised. For example: \u201cIrving, tell me, how is the chopped liver?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cMmmm! Sylvia, it\u2019s delicious!”<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know. First the chicken livers that the butcher gave me were dry. Then the timer on the oven didn\u2019t work. Then, at the last minute, I ran out of onions. Tell me, how could it be good?\u201d<\/p>\n
Though his own mother didn\u2019t think it was particularly funny, \u201cHow to Be a Jewish Mother\u201d sold more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone and opened the door for the 28-year-old Mr. Greenburg to embark on a long career as a writer.<\/p>\n
He subsequently published more than a dozen books for adults, including \u201cHow to Make Yourself Miserable\u201d (1966), \u201cWhat Do Women Want\u201d<\/a> (1982) and \u201cScoring: A Sexual Memoir\u201d<\/a> (1972), mostly based on his own neurotic and hilarious attempts at connecting with the opposite sex.<\/p>\n He branched into other genres as well \u2014 horror, the occult and murder mysteries \u2014 and he later began writing humorous children\u2019s fiction<\/a>, turning out numerous volumes of the popular \u201cThe Zack Files\u201d<\/a> series, for which his son was the inspiration.<\/p>\n The versatile Mr. Greenburg also acted, did stand-up comedy and wrote plays and movie scripts, including for the hits \u201cPrivate Lessons\u201d (1981) and \u201cPrivate School\u201d (1983).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Though he was a native Chicagoan, Mr. Greenburg was among the angst-ridden, carnally obsessed Jewish writers, like Woody Allen, Jules Feiffer and Philip Roth<\/a>, who emerged in New York during the sexually charged 1960s with shocking, comical and explicit explorations of their neurotic sexual fantasies and behaviors.<\/p>\n He wrote more than 150 humor pieces for The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Vanity Fair and other publications. When asked by his Playboy editor over lunch at a Chinese restaurant in 1972 to take part in an orgy in order to write an amusing essay, Mr. Greenburg was flummoxed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMy chopsticks suddenly became too heavy to hold, and I lowered them carefully to the table,\u201d he wrote in Playboy that year. \u201cI should tell you at this point that I am so shy with women that it took me till the age of 23 to lose my virginity, till 30 to get married, and today, at 36, I am still unable to go to an ordinary cocktail party and chitchat with folks like any regular grown-up person. The idea of sending old Greenburg to take part in an orgy was, frankly, tantamount to sending someone with advanced vertigo to do a tap dance on the wing of an airborne 747.\u201d<\/p>\n The woman he married at 30, in 1967, was the journalist Nora Ephron<\/a>, who would find success and fame as a comedy screenwriter and director after their nine-year marriage \u2014 the first for both of them \u2014 ended in an amicable divorce. They had the friendliest split one could imagine. \u201cWhen we got the divorce, we kept dating,\u201d Mr. Greenburg said on a podcast in 2021.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Greenburg\u2019s disarming wiseguy prose earned grudging respect from the critics. His examination of the paranormal, \u201cSomething\u2019s There\u201d (1976), was praised by John Leonard<\/a> in The New York Times for its \u201cskeptical, muscular, street-smart in the nether world\u201d look at the occult.<\/p>\n \u201cFans of the author of \u2018How to Be a Jewish Mother\u2019 and \u2018Scoring\u2019 will be pleased to learn that Mr. Greenburg hasn\u2019t lost his sense of humor, even if he has lost a portion of his mind,\u201d Mr. Leonard wrote. \u201cHe is still, like Dean Martin, preoccupied with sex.\u201d<\/p>\n Daniel Greenburg was born on June 20, 1936, to Samuel and Leah (Rozalsky) Greenburg. His mother was a Hebrew-school teacher, his father an artist. Intending to follow in his father\u2019s footsteps, Mr. Greenburg enrolled in the fine arts program at the University of Illinois but switched to industrial design. He graduated in 1958.<\/p>\n Wanting to abandon Chicago\u2019s cold winters, he packed up his secondhand Chevy and drove to Los Angeles. Knowing no one there and having few options, he applied to graduate school at U.C.L.A., where he earned a master\u2019s degree in fine arts.<\/p>\n He soon talked his way into a job as an advertising writer with a small agency. When he read J.D. Salinger\u2019s novel \u201cCatcher in the Rye,\u201d he was so moved by it that he decided he should try his hand at mimicking writers like Mr. Salinger.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He wrote a satirical version of \u201cGoldilocks and the Three Bears\u201d and, after selling it to Esquire in 1958 for $350, began to envision himself as a satirist. But, by his account, he knew he had a long way to go to become a successful writer.<\/p>\n Splitting his focus between advertising and magazine writing, Mr. Greenburg eventually landed in New York, where in the early 1960s he met the editor and publisher Ralph Ginzburg<\/a>, who was starting Eros, a magazine about erotica. Mr. Ginzburg recruited Mr. Greenburg to be its managing editor. Mr. Ginzburg went on to earn notoriety when he was convicted of violating federal obscenity laws in 1963.<\/p>\n Meeting a book publisher at a party, Mr. Greenburg pitched an idea for what he wanted to title \u201cThe Snob\u2019s Guide to Status Cars.\u201d The publisher, Roger Price<\/a> (who was also a humorist), rejected the pitch but suggested that Mr. Greenburg come back to him with another book idea. Over lunch days later, the two lamented how their Jewish mothers had used guilt to get them to eat. As he recalled on the 2021 podcast, Mr. Greenburg wondered: \u201cHow do they do this? Do they have a handbook on how to be Jewish mothers?\u201d<\/p>\n A lightbulb flashed on, he recalled, and he thought, \u201cI\u2019ll write that.\u201d Mr. Price liked the idea, offered a $500 advance, and \u201cHow to Be a Jewish Mother\u201d was published by Price, Stern, Sloan in late 1964. It became a hit and effectively launched Mr. Greenburg\u2019s writing career. It would go on to be published in 24 countries and was made into a musical<\/a>, which had a brief run on Broadway beginning in December 1967.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After divorcing Ms. Ephron, Mr. Greenburg in 1980 married the writer Suzanne O\u2019Malley, with whom he had his son, Zack, his only child. They divorced in the 1990s. In 1998 he married Judith C. Wilson, a writer. In addition to his son, she survives him, along with a granddaughter. Mr. Greenburg lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.<\/p>\n A fearful child, Mr. Greenburg undertook a series of hair-raising adventures as an adult while mining material for his children\u2019s books, which he began writing in the mid-1990s. He rode upside-down in an open-cockpit plane over the Pacific with a stunt pilot; was chased by an elephant in Africa; rode with New York City firefighters to fires and with the city\u2019s police in high-speed chases; and visited a tiger ranch in Texas, where he learned to discipline 200-pound tigers.<\/p>\n \u201cI visit schools constantly,\u201d he said in an online interview in 2006. \u201cI talk to kids.<\/a> I try out ideas on them, and I ask them what they like to read. Both boys and girls tell me they love scary stories and funny stories the best, and the boys tell me they love to be grossed out. I\u2019ve tried to put all three things in these books.\u201d<\/p>\n