David Simon (born 1960) is an American author, journalist, and a writer/producer of television series, best known as the creator of the HBO television series The Wire. He worked for the Baltimore Sun City Desk for twelve years. He wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and co-wrote The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood with Ed Burns. The former book was the basis for the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street, on which Simon served as a writer and producer. Simon adapted the latter book into the HBO mini-series The Corner. He is the creator of the HBO television series The Wire, for which he served as executive producer, head writer, and show runner for all five seasons. He adapted the non-fiction book Generation Kill into an HBO mini-series and served as the show runner for the project. He was selected as one of the 2010 MacArthur Fellows.

Simon was born to a Jewish family in Washington, D.C. He attended Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Maryland and wrote for the school newspaper, The Tattler. He graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park. While at college he wrote for The Diamondback and became friends with contemporary David Mills.

Upon leaving college he worked as a police reporter at The Baltimore Sun from 1982 to 1995. He spent most of his career covering the crime beat. A colleague has said that Simon loved journalism and felt it was "God's work". Simon says that he was initially altruistic and was inspired to enter journalism by the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate but became increasingly pragmatic as he gained experience. Later in his career he aimed to tell the best possible story without "cheating it".