Like One of the Family by Alice Childress

12, 1920, in Charleston, SC died of cancer, Aug. After hearing Shakespeare read she began acting and directing in the American Negro Theatre in Harlem in 1941, while also working at several jobs. ’ ” Left School for Acting CareerĬhildress attended grade school but did not finish high school. That sounds like something we should keep.

When we ’d get to the end of our game, my grandmother would say to me, ’Now, write that down. What do you think he ’s thinking? I ’d say, I don ’t know. As Childress stated in an interview in 1987, quoted in Black Literature Criticism, her grandmother “used to sit at the window and say, There goes a man. She was raised by her grandmother, Eliza Campbell, the daughter of a slave, who encouraged her to write. ”īorn into an impoverished family with little schooling on October 12, 1920, Childress spent her earliest years in Charleston, South Carolina, before being taken to live in Harlem, New York. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. My writing attempts to interpret the ’ordinary ’ because they are not ordinary. “No matter how many celebrities we may accrue, they cannot substitute for the masses of human beings. “I write about those who come in second, or not at all-the four hundred and ninety-nine and the intricate and magnificent patterns of a loser ’s life, ” she told Children ’s Literature Review. Part of her humanism came from using her own experiences to portray common everyday people in her works. In spite of her uncompromising themes, Childress has been called a great humanist. Because of the power of her work, one of her controversial plays was not carried on eight television stations and one of her books was banned from schools and libraries in several areas.

Her own plays and books, some of which were made into films and television movies, were well-known for their unflinching honesty about racism and its effects, especially concerning topics like miscegenation and teenage drug abuse. “Image not available for copyright reasons ”Īlice Childress, who died of cancer in Queens, New York, on August, 14, 1994, was a pioneering black actress, playwright, and novelist who paved the way for other African-American playwrights like Lorraine Hansberry and Amiri Baraka.

Like One of the Family by Alice Childress