Ned Vizzini

Edison Price "Ned" Vizzini (April 4, 1981 – December 19, 2013) was an American writer. He was the author of four books for young adults including It's Kind of a Funny Story, which NPR named #56 of the "100 Best-Ever Teen Novels" of all time and which is the basis of the film of the same name.

Biography

Ned Vizzini grew up primarily in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, graduating in 1999. Vizzini's characters and situations are said to be based upon his time spent at Stuyvesant.

Vizzini's first published work was an essay he submitted to the New York Press, analternative newspaper, about winning honorable mention at the 1996 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. As a freelance writer for the paper, he wrote about everything from family vacations to getting drunk in the street with dangerous urban youth. The success of Vizzini's work earned him an invitation to contribute a teen-focused article to the New York Times Magazine.

In May 1998, Vizzini's essay "Teen Angst? Nah!" appeared in the Times Magazine. Following this, several of his New York Press columns became the core of his first book, Teen Angst? Naaah...: A Quasi-Autobiography, which was published when he was 19 years old. Vizzini attended Hunter College, located in Manhattan. In 2004 his first novel Be More Chill was published. A review for the New York Times Book Review said that Be More Chill, which is about a high school student named Jeremy Heere who gets a supercomputer pill in his brain that makes him cool, "is so accurate that it should come with a warning." 

Others have criticized the book for its language and lack of a clear moral. In 2006 Vizzini's second novel It's Kind of a Funny Story was published. It is based on Vizzini's five-day stay in Brooklyn's Methodist Hospital psychiatric ward. The book recounts fifteen-year-old Craig Gilner's battle with suicidal depression as a result of a taxing school year at Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School that exacerbates his feeling of social inadequacy. In 2012 Vizzini's third novel The Other Normals was published.The Other Normals is an "Alternative Fantasy" about a teenager who falls into a fantasy world that is the basis of his favoriterole-playing game.

With Nick Antosca, Vizzini wrote two episodes of the 2012 season of MTV's supernatural drama Teen Wolf.

In 2013, House of Secrets, the first novel in a middle grade fantasy series by Vizzini and filmmaker Chris Columbus, was published. Entertainment Weekly gave House of Secrets an "A-" review.

His essays and criticism appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Salon.

Vizzini had spoken at schools and libraries around the world about mental health, writing, and how students can use writing as a medicine for mental health. He has spoken at UCLA; The Dalton School; the Brooklyn, New York, and Chicago Public Libraries;Murray State University; NYU; The National Council of Teachers of English; and at a Master's Tea at Yale.

Vizzini and Antosca were story editors on ABC's 2013 drama series Last Resort. They are the credited writers of the episode "Nuke It Out."

Vizzini committed suicide on December 19, 2013 in Brooklyn, New York. He is survived by his wife and their son.

Bibliography

• Teen Angst? Naaah..., a "quasi-autobiography" that consists of essays about Vizzini's young adult years attending Stuyvesant High School.
• Be More Chill, Vizzini's fiction debut follows the adventures of Jeremy Heere, a terminally "uncool" teenage boy. Jeremy's life changes when he buys a "squip", a pill that gives the user instructions on how to act cool.
• It's Kind of a Funny Story, Vizzini's second novel follows a depressed young man who becomes suicidal and checks himself into a psychiatric hospital. The book was inspired by Vizzini's own brief hospitalization for depression in November 2004, as described in the book's endnotes. Its movie rights were sold to Paramount. The motion picture, starring Keir Gilchrist, Zach Galifianakis, and Emma Roberts and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, debuted on October 8, 2010.
• The Other Normals is a story about about a late bloomer who unexpectedly turns into an epic warrior at summer camp. Its publication was announced on March 21, 2011 in Publishers Weekly, and its cover was released on EW.com on February 24, 2012.
• House of Secrets, the first in a trilogy of novels co-authored by Ned Vizzini and Chris Columbus about the Walker kids, who find themselves in a mashed up world created by a fantasy writer's imagination.