Gardner was educated at New York's High School of Performing Arts, Carnegie-Mellon University and Antioch College. While a student at Antioch, he began drawing The Nebbishes. The comic strip was picked up by the Chicago Tribune and syndicated to 60-75 major newspapers from 1959 to 1961. Even before syndication, the Gardner characters were a national craze, marketed on statuettes, studio cards, barware, wall decorations and posters. In 1960, after "the balloons were getting larger and larger, and there was hardly any drawing left", he dropped it and began writing plays.
Plays and films
Gardner is best known for his 1962 play A Thousand Clowns, which ran for 428 performances. He received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay for the successful 1965 movie adaptation. The play was revived in 1996 and 2001. Both the 1962 play and the movie starred Jason Robards, Jr. as Murray Burns, a charming, unemployed children's show writer, who is forced to choose between social conformity and the probable loss of custody of his 11-year-old nephew to the Child Welfare Bureau. The Robards character was in part based on Gardner's friend at that time, humorist Jean Shepherd. In 2000, Robards wrote:
I feel A Thousand Clowns is his masterpiece. It is a real human comedy of poignancy and laughter, with all of humanity's foibles and eccentricities. There is a great depth of love and understanding for all in this play. There are great life lessons to learn daily, which I find myself still doing. For Herb Gardner to have written this play in his early twenties is a miracle.
Gardner's biggest commercial success was the 1985 play I'm Not Rappaport, which ran for two years, won the Tony Award for Best Play and became the basis for a 1996 movie. In 2012, a theater group in Germany came under fire for allowing a white actor to paint his face and take the part of the black character Midge Carter. Other Broadway credits include The Goodbye People, Thieves, and Conversations with My Father. He collaborated with Jule Styne on the ill-fated 1980 musical One Night Stand.
Gardner's first wife was actress Rita Gardner; the union ended in divorce. He later married Barbara Sproul, with whom he raised two adopted sons, Jake Gardner and Rafferty Gardner. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was the boyfriend of actress Marlo Thomas.
Death
Gardner died in his Manhattan apartment from complications of lung disease on September 25, 2003, aged 68.
