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AMIRI BARAKA is one of the most controversial of contemporary American playwrights. Born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934, he seemed destined for a respectable middle-class career. Jones first attended Rutgers University, then Howard University, where he obtained a B.A. in English. After serving in the Air Force, he moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he became part of a group of artists, musicians, and writers. Together with his new wife Hettie, he started the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen. He also founded Totem Press, whose claim to fame is that it was the first to publish works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others.
Jones published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. His increasing mistrust of white society emerged in two plays, The Slave and The Toilet, both written in 1962. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman in 1964. The controversial play won an Obie Award (for 'best off-Broadway play') and was turned into a film.
In 1965, after the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones ended his former life and his marriage. He moved to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre /School, which lasted only a few months. He returned to Newark, and in 1967 married the African-American poet Sylvia Robinson (now known as Arnina Baraka). In the same year he also founded the Spirit House Players.
In 1968 his play Home on the Range was performed as a benefit for the Black Panther party. Jones became a Muslim and changed his name to Amiri Baraka. In 1969, his play Slave Ship attracted much critical attention. Baraka founded and chaired the Congress of African People, a pan-Africanist organization. In 1974 Baraka adopted a Marxist-Leninist philosophy. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka was published in 1984. He has received numerous literary prizes and fellowships, and taught at numerous universities before becoming professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1985.1
The Motion of History (1976) demonstrates Baraka' s inclination to mythologize history by making the characters of his plays resemble revolutionaries of extraordinary powers and potential. Although Baraka draws on historical documents and archival materials, he by no...