Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson - Hardcover

Hatch, James V.

4.67

6 ratings by Goodreads

9780252019777: Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252019776 ISBN 13: 9780252019777

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1993

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Born the ninth child of a poor Brooklyn family, Owen Dodson (1914-83) rose to a life of stunning achievement. A scholarship student at Bates College, where his classmates included John Ciardi and Edmund S. Muskie, Dodson went on to advanced study at Yale. His poetry and first novel were widely hailed by critics and general readers; during his career, he wrote or directed more than 300 dramatic presentations, and for twenty-five years he was a professor of drama at Howard University.
James Hatch draws on extensive interviews with Dodson, his family, and his friends, and on access to private papers, placing Dodson in a social and literary context that will help readers understand Dodson's struggle with arthritis, alcohol, race, and homophobic prejudice.

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About the Author:

Arnold Rampersad is professor of English at Princeton University.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An artful biography from Hatch (English/CCNY; Roots of African-American Drama, 1858-1940, etc.--not reviewed) that conveys the charm, complexity, pain, vision, and humanity of the amazing black gay actor, teacher, and writer Owen Dodson. Born in 1870, educated among the ambitious immigrant European population of N.Y.C., orphaned when he was 12, Dodson, a Bates College scholarship student, was--like many black intelligentsia of his generation--overeducated for the work that was available to him, but he found refuge in a series of academic posts teaching theater at such black colleges as Atlanta University (where he met W.E.B. DuBois), Lincoln, and, finally, Howard. There, his innovative production of Ibsen won the entire cast an invitation to Scandinavia. In plays (Sonata, The Poet's Caprice), a novel (Boy at the Window), and three volumes of poetry, he recorded the deprivations, exclusions, and insecurities that blacks of his generation suffered. He rejected dialect as ``plantation talk,'' as well as what he called the ``art of insult'' used by black writers like LeRoi Jones. Dodson's friendships--which transcended class, race, and political barriers--included alliances with W.H. Auden, Sir John Gielgud (who coached Dodson to do a black Hamlet), and Paul Robeson. His talent, charm, and idealism won patrons and supporters from Orson Welles--who offered to waive his fees for a black educational film--to the four-year-old who assured him that ``God made the world for you.'' But Dodson's sexual relationships were ill-fated and unhappy, and, in 1983, he died a lonely alcoholic, crippled by arthritis. Though perhaps unlucky in life, Dodson is lucky in his biographer--who values clarity, context, the revealing anecdote, and, above all, his subject's art. (Twenty-five photographs) -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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