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. 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.

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. He worked like a son of a b– and he worked all day and he’d come home, we had dinner, he’d take a bath, put on his bathrobe, and that’s what I remember him doing every night,” he explains with deep admiration.

“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.

“It was called the St. Nicholas Theater. And we started putting on plays and we all had day jobs, all of us, and there wasn’t any money. We had the time of our lives.”

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.” His screenplays include “The Verdict,” for which Mamet received an Academy Award nomination, and “The Untouchables” and “Wag the Dog,” which earned him his second Oscar nomination.

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.

The Village Voice headline read, “David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.'”