Green, Paul

A Paul Green Reader features Green's drama and fiction, with texts of three plays - including the famous second act of The Lost Colony - and six short stories. It also reveals the life behind Green's work through several of his essays and letters and an excerpt from his unique Wordbook, a collection of regional folklore. Avery's introduction outlines Green's life and examines the central concerns and techniques of his work.

This exceptional collection provides new insight into the life and works of North Carolina writer and activist Paul Green (1894-1981), the first playwright from the South to attract national and international attention for his socially conscious dramas. A native of Harnett County, Green was a devoted teacher of philosophy and drama at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He became a leading member of the generation of writers who launched the southern literary renaissance and played a significant role in creating an authentic drama of black life, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his play In Abraham's Bosom in 1927. From the 1930s until his death in 1981, he devoted much of his energy to the outdoor historical plays he called symphonic dramas, including his longest-running work, The Lost Colony (1937), which is one of several of his plays still performed before large audiences today. Concern for human rights characterized Green's life as well as his plays, and his efforts on behalf of the poor and uneducated led him to advocate the abolition of chain gangs and capital punishment. His crusades were an important contribution to the broader social developments fundamental to the emerging New South in the first half of this century. Laurence Avery has culled and annotated the 329 letters in this volume from over 9,000 existing pieces. Letters to such figures as Sherwood Anderson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, and Zora Neale Hurston appear throughout. Avery's introduction and full bibliography of the playwright's works and productions give readers a context for understanding Green's life and times. Carl Sandburg called Green "one of the best talkers in the U.S.A." and for Green, letters were just another form of conversation. They are alive with the intellect, buoyant spirit, and sensitivity to the human condition that enabled him to become such a powerful force in his day

Between 1917 and 1919, often literally with the sound of the battlefield guns in his ears, Paul Green wrote poems about the enormity of World War I. These poems he kept in five separate manuscript collections, and, with only a few exceptions, he did not publish them or even talk much about them during his long career. Recently acquisitioned in the Paul Green Papers in the Southern Historical Collection of the Library of the University of North Carolina and published here for the first time, Paul Green's war poems provide another chapter to the literary responses to World War I, "the war to end all wars" and the transforming event usually credited, or blamed, for closing off one cultural era and replacing it with a self-conscious Modernism. In particular, Green's poems provide considerable insight into the ways that the twentieth-century rural culture of eastern North Carolina was reshaped by the experiences of that war. Historian John Herbert Roper contributes an introduction, notes, and an interpretive essay that provide a cultural and biographical background for these poems.

2 v. (xxii, 1245 p.) : 24 cm

Pageant drama concerning the American Revolution in which Thomas Jefferson is a central character; the play closes with him on the bluffs of Richmond, musing about the new nation. Bicentennial edition, revised and rewritten, published in New York: Samuel French, 1976.--Frank Shuffelton.

''Hymn to the Rising Sun,'' a grim prison drama from the 1930's, takes place in the barracks of a rural Southern work camp in the early morning on the Fourth of July, and the idea of the cruelly incarcerated waking to Independence Day is the irony that thrums loudly throughout the play. --NY Times, Feb. 5, 2001.

20 of the best American plays from 1930-1939.