Biography of Joseph Ritz

Joseph P. Ritz resumed writing plays in the 1980s because of an acute sense of fair play. At one time during a long journalistic career he was a drama critic. The New York Foundation for the Arts awarded him a playwriting fellowship in 2002. He is the author of two books. The Despised Poor received favorable reviews in the New York Times and several other newspapers and in national magazines in the mid 1960s. In 2006 a book of humorous stories about his life as a journalist was published under the title, I Never Looked for My Mother and Other Regrets of a Journalist. Ritz wrote part of a series of articles entitled The Road to Integration, which won a Pulitzer Prize for the Gannett Group of newspapers. He has also won several national and state awards in his own right for his newspaper stories in The Buffalo Courier-Express and The Buffalo News.