Neil Diamond

Background

Neil Leslie Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York 1941, on January 24, 1941. Diamond’s father, Akeeba “Kieve” Diamond, was a Polish dry goods merchant. His mother, Rose, was Russian. All four of his grandparents were immigrants who fled to the US. Diamond attended Erasmus Hall High School where he joined choir groups that were available at his school, along with his classmate Barbra Streisand. He attended his second high school, Abraham Lincoln High School, in 1959 in Brighton Beach, New York, where he was a member of the fencing team.

When Diamond was 16 years old, he received his first guitar as a birthday gift. He spent time at a summer camp called Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in New York. This is where he first saw Pete Seeger perform at a concert. This moment was pivotal as he realized he wanted to be a songwriter. He started poetry for girls in school and later for his friends as well.

After high school, he attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship. He was a member of the N.C.A.A. men’s championship fencing team in 1960. In his senior year, he cut classes to sing at the Tin Pan Alley, where he hoped to get noticed by local producers. Sunbeam Music Publishing eventually offered him his first job to write songs for $50 a week, he then dropped out of college to accept this offer.

He married his high school sweetheart Jaye Posner in 1963 and had two daughters. They divorced in 1967. Two years later, he met Marcia Murphey with whom he had two sons. After 25 years together, they called it quits. When he was 70 years old, Diamond met 41-year-old Katie McNeil, and the couple married in Los Angeles in 2012.