Louis Peterson remains best known for his only published play, Take a Giant Step (1954), a partly autobiographical portrayal of a middle-class black youth's painful, yet often comic, passage to manhood. Though frequently acclaimed as a universal depiction of adolescence, Take a Giant Step emphasizes the special stresses on a black growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood. One of less than a dozen plays by blacks to be produced on Broadway prior to Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), it has made an important contribution to the development of black drama. In his introduction to A Black Quartet (1970), Clayton Riley, a critic strongly supportive of black revolutionary theater, pointed out that "we need not agree with what ... such playwrights as Loften Mitchell, Louis Peterson and Lorraine Hansberry have had to say in order to recognize the rigors of those battles they fought so that we who follow...