Roger Lichtenberg Simon is an American novelist, screenwriter, and CEO of Pajamas Media. He is the author of ten novels, including the Moses Wine detective series, and six screenplays. He has served as president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, and was on the faculty of the American Film Institute and the Sundance Institute.
Simon was nominated for an Academy Award for co-writing the screenplay of the 1989 film Enemies, a Love Story. Among his other screenwriting credits are Bustin' Loose, with Richard Pryor, and Scenes from a Mall, with Woody Allen and Bette Midler. His screen adaptation of his own novel, The Big Fix, starred actor Richard Dreyfuss, who portrayed laidback private detective Moses Wine. The Wine novels have been nominated for Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, and have been translated into over a dozen languages. The Big Fix received the John Creasey Award for best first crime novel from the Crime Writers of Great Britain.
He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Yale School of Drama. He has been married three times. He is currently married to Sheryl Longin, who wrote the screenplay for Dick, a film spoof of Watergate. In 1997, Simon directed the feature film Prague Duet from a script he and Longin wrote.
Simon experienced a political transformation in which he felt alienated from what he saw as the excesses of the Left after the realities of the September 11, 2001 attacks affected him. He jokes, "I may be the first American writer who was profiled both by Mother Jones and National Review." He supports same-gender marriage and the War on Terror, and contends that those issues are linked. He also edits a weblog. In 2005 he founded, with jazz guitarist Charles Johnson, webmaster of the Little Green Footballs weblog, a startup company called Pajamas Media. Pajamas Media expanded in 2008 into Internet television with Pajamas TV.
Simon's first non-fiction book, Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror, was published by Encounter Books in February 2009.