People Who Led to My Plays [Paperback]

In this remarkable memoir, Adrienne Kennedy charts her life from growing up in Cleveland in the 1930s and 40s in a middle-class black family through marriage and motherhood and her eventual move to New York City in the 50s. Out of a sequence of deceptively spare statements emerges a complex portrait of the artist as a young woman as she examines the people and events that compelled her to be a writer.

People Who Led to My Playshas served as a model for me in considering how ones artistic practice is rooted and thrives in the soil of the past and how an artist uses history (with a small and a large h) as the raw material for ones practice, molding and transforming and bringing it into the present. I thank you for your extraordinary work in unpacking black life on the stage and showing us how truly rich and strange it is. --Glenn Ligon

I have been reading and teachingPeople Who Led to My Playssince its first publication in 1987. At once collage, diary, memoir and annotated scrapbook, it felt miraculous then and still does. With fearless imagination and formal daring, Adrienne Kennedy has given us A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman and an American literary classic. --Margo Jefferson

Adrienne Kennedy has introduced a new form of black autobiography, one that, like her plays, will be widely imitated. Like most great artists in whose work different cultures and styles converge, she is unique. --Ishmael Reed

Just as her brilliant plays changed what was possible on the stage, Adrienne Kennedy's autobiography transformed the form. Written with a poet's insight and a dramatist's sense of form, Kennedy's autobiography is a classic--one that not only illuminates her singular work, but the world and politics that made her. --Hilton Als

Reissue: OLD ISBN 0-930452-90-9 1987, Sold 5,000 Originally published by knopf in HC, sold 10,000 Previous publications ADRIENNE KENNEDY IN ONE ACT lCb