Harry Kondoleon's idiosyncratic mixture of whimsy, religiosity, and rage made him one of the most distinctive dramatists to emerge in the New York theater of the 1980s. Although his plays only occasionally found favor with mainstream reviewers, they attracted a relatively small but enthusiastic following who found in them an ingenious expression of spiritual desperation amid affluence and privilege. Kondoleon was not yet forty when he died of AIDS; his play Zero Positive (1988) and his novel Diary of a Lost Boy (1994) remain two of the most eloquent expressions of the earlier years of the epidemic.

Kondoleon was born on 26 February 1955 and raised in Queens, New York, the son of Sophocles Kondoleon, a public accountant, and Athena Cola Kondoleon, a secretary. He had one older sister, Christine. As a student at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, he quickly established himself as a talented dramatist, winning the school's Wallace...