No history of black American theater would be complete without the inclusion of Theodore Ward. One of the first serious black playwrights of the modern period, Ward made play writing and the theater his life's work. Unfortunately, to this day, most of his work has gone unexamined and unproduced. Although his professional reputation was made in a single decade, between 1938 and 1948, Ward's vision of a skillful and historically accurate black theater was to be an animating vision of the New Black Theater Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was re-discovered.

Ward was born in Thibodaux, Louisiana, on 15 September 1902, the eighth of eleven children, the son of a schoolteacher mother and an itinerant peddler father. Although Ward managed to acquire only a grade school education, he supplemented it through his extensive reading. (Among the products sold from the back of his father's wagon were books--religious...