Ed Bullins is one of the most gifted and certainly the most prolific of the dramatists who emerged from the black arts movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He rapidly gained prominence both because of the power and elegance of his plays and because of his central role in the period's most exciting and influential theater, the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem; its principles and practice shaped his own work, while he helped develop the theater's distinctive quality and style. Nurtured by the black arts movement, Bullins understood its aims perfectly and while his plays occasionally criticize the movement's rhetoric, they also embody and extend its precepts. Now the author of well over fifty plays, at least twenty-nine of which are published and at least forty of which have been professionally produced, Bullins has become one of America's most important playwrights.

Bullins's influence on black theater...