SOURCE: Adler, Thomas P. “The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse—Race.” In Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama, pp. 68-84. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1987.

In the following excerpt, Adler discusses some Pulitzer Prize-winning plays that dealt with the subject of race relations, noting how the plays reflect their historical context.

It would be over fifty years after the establishment of the Pulitzers and well over forty years after the first Broadway production of a work by a black writer (Garland Anderson's Appearances in 1925) before a black playwright would receive the drama award. Racial issues, however, not only surface in but dominate a number of American plays from the mid-nineteenth century on, including such well-known ones as George Aiken's adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859), Edward Sheldon's The Nigger (1909), O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings (1926), Langston Hughes's...