Synopsis:
In this scrapbook of words, pictures, and memories, an award-winning playwright tells what it was like to be a young Black girl in the 1940s, aspiring to be a writer
Review:
"People Who Led to My Plays has served as a model for me in considering how one’s artistic practice is rooted and thrives in the soil of the past and how an artist uses history (with a small and a large “h”) as the raw material for one’s practice, molding and transforming and bringing it into the present. I thank you for your extraordinary work in unpacking black life on the stage and showing us how truly rich and strange it is." --Glenn Ligon
"I have been reading and teaching People Who Led to My Plays since its first publication in 1987. At once collage, diary, memoir and annotated scrapbook, it felt miraculous then and still does. With fearless imagination and formal daring, Adrienne Kennedy has given us A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman and an American literary classic." --Margo Jefferson
"Adrienne Kennedy has introduced a new form of black autobiography, one that, like her plays, will be widely imitated. Like most great artists in whose work different cultures and styles converge, she is unique." --Ishmael Reed
"Just as her brilliant plays changed what was possible on the stage, Adrienne Kennedy's autobiography transformed the form. Written with a poet's insight and a dramatist's sense of form, Kennedy's autobiography is a classic--one that not only illuminates her singular work, but the world and politics that made her." --Hilton Als
"People Who Led to My Plays has served as a model for me in considering how one’s artistic practice is rooted and thrives in the soil of the past and how an artist uses history (with a small and a large h”) as the raw material for one’s practice, molding and transforming and bringing it into the present. I thank you for your extraordinary work in unpacking black life on the stage and showing us how truly rich and strange it is." --Glenn Ligon
"I have been reading and teaching People Who Led to My Plays since its first publication in 1987. At once collage, diary, memoir and annotated scrapbook, it felt miraculous then and still does. With fearless imagination and formal daring, Adrienne Kennedy has given us A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman and an American literary classic." --Margo Jefferson
"Adrienne Kennedy has introduced a new form of black autobiography, one that, like her plays, will be widely imitated. Like most great artists in whose work different cultures and styles converge, she is unique." --Ishmael Reed
"Just as her brilliant plays changed what was possible on the stage, Adrienne Kennedy's autobiography transformed the form. Written with a poet's insight and a dramatist's sense of form, Kennedy's autobiography is a classic--one that not only illuminates her singular work, but the world and politics that made her." --Hilton Als
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.