Overview

A revealing collection of words, memories, and pictures-an autobiographical scrapbook-by an outstanding contemporary playwright. In this remarkable memoir, Adrienne Kennedy charts her life from growing up in Cleveland in the 1930s and '40s in a middle-class Black family through marriage, motherhood, and her eventual move to New York City in the '50s. Out of a sequence of deceptively spare statements emerges a complex portrait of the artist as a young woman, as she examines the people and events that compelled her to be a writer.

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9781559361255

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Reviews

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

Author Information

Adrienne Kennedy in 1996. Among Kennedy's many honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters award and the Guggenheim fellowship. She has been commissioned to write works for The Public Theater, Jerome Robbins, the Royal Court Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, and Juilliard. In 19951996, Signature Theatre Company dedicated its entire season to presenting her works. Kennedy has been a visiting professor at Yale University, Princeton, Brown University, the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. Kennedy attended Ohio State University and received an honorary doctorate in 2003 in recognition of the 50th anniversary of her graduation.

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