Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer (1935-2020) was an award-winning playwright and author, and a celebrated public health and gay rights advocate. He wrote the critically-acclaimed, Tony Award-winning play The Normal Heart (and subsequent Emmy Award-winning HBO television adaptation), the Academy Award–nominated screenplay adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, the bestselling novel Faggots, and the satirical two-volume novel The American People (Search for My Heart and The Brutality of Fact).

A pioneering AIDS activist, he cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982 and founded ACT UP in 1987. Kramer won numerous awards for his plays and received the 2013 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist.