Amiri Baraka collection of playscripts

1964-1986

Imamu Amiri Baraka is a writer whose variety of forms include drama, poetry, music criticism, fiction, autobiography and the essay. As a major and controversial author, his ideas and art - especially, as the primary architect of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960's - have had a profound influence on the direction of subsequent African-American literature.

Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey of working class parents; he attended Rutgers, Howard, and Columbia Universities and the New School for Social Research. He has taught at several universities and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater School in Harlem in 1964. His literary career began in 1958 when he founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press. Although Baraka started publishing in the early 1960s, he did not achieve fame until the 1964 publication of his play Dutchman, later made into a movie. Other important plays he wrote include The Slave (1964) and Toilet (1964). A prolific writer, Baraka has published two books of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) and The Dead Lecturer (1964). The mid 1960s saw the publication of The System of Dante's Hell, a novel, and Tales, a collection of short stories. Baraka also wrote a major social-aesthetic study of African-American music, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963).

Baraka's career has gone through a series of dramatic stages, from his Beatnik years in the late 1950s through the early 1960s when he refused to take action in the world, to black cultural nationalist, renouncing the white world in the mid-1960s through mid-1970s, to a Marxist-Leninist rejecting monopoly capitalism starting in the mid-1970s. In 1974, dramatically reversing himself, Baraka rejected black nationalism as racist and became a Third World Socialist. Some critics see Baraka as one of this century's major literary figures who has significantly affected the course of African American literary culture.