Comedian. He was an American stand-up comedian who is best remembered for his satirical social commentaries and criticism of the 1950s and 1960s, which challenged his right of Freedom of Speech. Born Leonard Alfred Schneider in a Jewish household in Mineola on Long Island, New York, he grew up in nearby Bellmore, attending Mepham High School. When he was five years old, his parents divorced, which led to him being raised in various relatives' households over the next twelve years, as he single mother, Sally Marr, a stage performer, had difficulties providing for him. He rarely saw his father. During World War II, he joined the US Navy at age sixteen and saw duty in Europe, until his discharge in 1946. In 1947, he adopted the stage name of "Lenny Bruce" and for free meals did impromptu standup comedy in Brooklyn clubs. Despite such a modest beginning, he got a break as the winner of the April 18, 1949 "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts" show, doing voice mimics of Hollywood movie stars. His career in the 1950s included screenplays he had written for the movies "Dance Hall Racket" in 1953 and "Dream Follies" in 1954, often anything he could do to make money. He would begin to lace his comedy routines with frank but funny discussions of themes that made many Americans uncomfortable, talking about race, politics, religion, abortion, drugs, the Ku Klux Klan, and on being Jewish. As his fame grew, so did his detractors. Some people thought his social commentary was "a fad" while others wondered if he was a harbinger of new thought in the American people. His comedy frequently included "four-letter words". In October of 1961, Bruce was arrested for obscenity during one of his comic workshops, and although he was acquitted, law enforcement agencies began to monitor his activities. Over the next three years, Bruce became a target for Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, a staunch Roman Catholic close to the Archbishop of New York, Francis Cardinal Spellman. After being arrested in Philadelphia for drug possession and in Los Angeles for obscenity, he was arrested twice in New York's Greenwich Village for obscenity. At the time, Greenwich Village was a well-known location for artists and non-traditional free-thinkers to gather. During his six-month trial in 1964, numerous writers, artists, actors and prominent society leaders provided positive support for Bruce, gathering public opinion on his behalf. Bruce was found guilty, and sentenced to four months in a workhouse, yet he was released on bail during his appeal process, in which the conviction would be overturned in 1970. Bruce would make television appearances in which he would include details of his encounters with the police, making them objects of ridicule, ranting against fascism and lack of freedom of speech; this would increase police pressure against him. Bruce was also banned from publicly performing in a number of cities, and due in part to his drug use, was banned from many nightclubs. He contributed a number of articles to the satirical magazine, "The Realist," such as "Obscenity, Narcotics and Me," which was published in March of 1964. His last recorded public performance was at the Berkeley Community Theatre in California in December of 1965, although he would last appear in San Francisco on June 25, 1966 in a concert with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. On August 3, 1966, he was found in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home dead from an accidental overdose of morphine. He married in 1951, had a daughter in 1955 and was divorced in 1959. In December 2003, New York Governor George Pataki granted Bruce a posthumous pardon for his obscenity conviction, the first such posthumous pardon in New York history. Since his death, Bruce has been considered an icon of comic social commentary, and an inspiration to many other social commentators since then. He paved the way for future outspoken counterculture-era comedians, and his trial for obscenity is seen as a landmark for freedom of speech in the United States.