A Paul Green Reader

May 15, 1998
North Carolina playwright and educator Green (1894^-1981) was a regional writer best known in his time for his heartfelt, unsentimental portraits of life in the rural South. The Pulitzer Prize^-winning "In Abraham's Bosom," first produced in 1926 by the Provincetown Players, told the then-controversial story of an ambitious African American who tries to rise above his rural sharecropping roots but whose various enterprises are thwarted by a culture determined to keep black men down. Similarly, Green's "Hymn to the Rising Sun" was a powerful indictment of chain gangs in general and North Carolina's penal system in particular. Gathered here are those plays; "The Lost Colony," a pageant play about the ill-fated early English settlement on Roanoke Island that is still staged annually in Manteo, North Carolina; and a generous selection of short stories, personal essays, and letters written in support of liberal political causes. Sadly missing, though, is the satirical antiwar musical "Johnny Johnson," which Green created with Kurt Weill for the Group Theater. ((Reviewed May 15, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)