Before he was David Mamet the acclaimed author, filmmaker and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, he worked a variety of low-paying jobs well into his 20s: from kitchen help at a summer camp to a maintenance worker in a truck factory to working in the Merchant Marine doing maintenance on boats. Mamet said he knows what it’s like to get your hands dirty to make ends meet.

“I also worked in a day camp teaching. Even right after I got out of college, I was unemployable, didn’t have any skills, and the degree wasn’t worth anything,” Mamet said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

“The one thing I knew how to do was to work because they say, ‘You can’t get work in Chicago, you can’t work.’ Well, I found ways to work because I had to,” the Chicago native said.

All of these experiences formed not just his distinctive talent capturing the human experience with blunt, raw, emotional dialogue. They allowed him to capture what the loss of dignity and power does to men in the American workforce, how betrayal and chaos creates complicated relationships, and how the slow breakdown of morality through outside pressures can lead the everyman toward catastrophe.

Through it all, one common thread in his work is what he refers to as his “crazy love of our country.”

“My grandparents were immigrants. My dad was raised by a single mom during the Depression, very, very poor, and she didn’t speak English, and I knew my grandmother very well,” he recalls with deep fondness, adding, “She was a wonderful woman.”

Mamet said his father grew up and went to college on the GI Bill, got into Northwestern University and graduated first in his class.

“And then he set out on the business of going to work.

As a result, Mamet emulated his father’s work ethic.

“So I always worked as a kid. I worked weekends and holidays and all the summer vacations, so I knew what it was to get a job and go to work.”

After Mamet earned his Merchant Mariner card, he went to New York but struggled to find work.

“So I went back to Chicago and worked cleaning offices, and I worked a lot of stuff in food preparation and service, and I drove a cab for a year there, a whole bunch of stuff,” he explained.

Somewhere in there he said he started writing plays.

“I got asked to come back to this college and work directing theater,” he explained.

After the position ran out, he along with fellow thespian William H. Macy, whom he had known since college, decided to go off on their own and start their own theater company.

Mamet would go on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Glengarry Glen Ross” as well as “Oleanna,” “Speed-the-Plow,” which earned him a Tony nomination, and “American Buffalo.”

Mamet said 50 years after starting his first theater company and writing his first plays, he is still in awe that it happened.

He was Hollywood and Broadway’s darling until 2008, when the Village Voice asked him to write a story about a play he had done centering on American politicians, a profession he said he always found amusing.

Mamet called the article “Political Civility.”

The pushback was ugly.

Mamet said he had gone from the golden boy to the boy whose number everyone lost.

His latest book is aptly called “The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment.” It is a force of nature that examines our corporate curators who hold power in government, institutions, academia, politics and of course Hollywood. They are seen with a keen, unfiltered eye that deconstructs the influence they have had on everything we see, feel and touch.