PAPERBACK ISBN: 0-88258-062-0     $43.95

Pub Date: 1994

An Anthology (Second Edition)

Edited by Darwin T. Turner

The late Darwin T. Turner, distinguished literary scholar and teacher, was a prolific author, editor, bibliographer, and critic of African American and American literature. In this expanded edition of Black Drama in America: An Anthology, Turner presents a vivid cross-section of African American drama written from the 1920s to the 1990s and includes nine plays that were not published in the first edition. The collected works, selected from each decade, furnish a representative history of the African American playwright’s develop­ment. Beginning with the 1923 drama, The Chip Woman’s Fortune, the themes and settings each evokes create a por­trait of current as well as perennial issues of black life rendered in a variety of forms—historical, realistic, romantic, mythical, revolutionary, and ritu­alistic. Other plays selected for this anthology include works by African American playwrights with national reputations in professional theatre such as Langston Hughes, Theodore Ward, Owen Dodson, Louis Peterson, Alice Childress, Ed Bullins, Charlie L. Russell, Amiri Baraka, George H. Bass, Charlie H. Fuller Jr., August Wilson, J. e. Franklin, and Pearl Cleage.  Discussions of Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, women playwrights, and the Negro Ensemble Company supplement the comprehensive introduction from the first edition, and an expanded bibliography rounds out this volume.

About the Editor

Darwin T. Turner began his career as an extraordinarily gifted youth of 18, the age at which he completed his master’s degree in English and American dramatic literature at the University of Cincinnati. From 1980 until his death in 1991, Dr. Turner was the University of Iowa Foundation Distinguished Professor of English.

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