“Ahead of His Time, Yet a Man of His Time:” A New Book Reflects on the Legacy of Playwright Paul Green

Paul Green was a literary giant. His lifelong home was North Carolina but he was a cultural force—a nationally known playwright, fiction writer, essayist, and teacher who was prominent in the first half of the 20th century. Yet he’s largely forgotten today.

A new book of essays, North Carolina Writers on the Legacy of the State’s Most Celebrated Playwright, co-edited by Georgann Eubanks, executive director of the Paul Green Foundation, and Margaret Bauer of East Carolina University, explores some reasons for this, with essays by eleven writers, including Marjorie Hudson, Kathryn Hunter-Williams, Jill McCorkle, and Mike Wiley.

Paul Green was born in 1894 in eastern North Carolina’s Harnett County. His rise in the literary world was rapid: He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1927 for his Broadway play, In Abraham’s Bosom, which had a mostly Black cast. In 1931, The House of Connelly was chosen as the first production of the experimental Group Theatre. He went on to collaborate with Richard Wright on a Broadway adaptation of the novel, Native Son and received writing credit for all three glitzy Hollywood productions of State Fair. 

His longest legacy, The Lost Colony, first produced in 1937, is still running today at the Outer Banks every summer. His literary friendships—with Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Sherwood Anderson, among others—ran deep. A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, Green continued his career at the state’s flagship university, teaching philosophy and the dramatic arts. He died in Chapel Hill in 1981 at the age of 87. 

Race was Green’s central theme and literary through line.

His plays are dramatic and engrossing. His fiction, essays, and letters are full of warmth and revelation. He was an advocate for civil rights and prison reform and an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. On the flip side, his writing for the theater now feels out of step. His Black characters sometimes seem built on stereotypes; the dialogue in his plays, an attempt to represent the vernacular of the Black South, is often clumsy and cringeworthy.

“These essays ask hard questions in a present-day context about Green’s relevance,” writes Eubanks in the book’s preface, going on to state that the book is not intended as a comprehensive biography but as an opening of a conversation about a man who was seen as “progressive, even radical, in his time” and whose artistic prominence as an American playwright has dimmed in recent decades. 

In her essay on Green, Kathryn Hunter-Williams—chair of the Department of Dramatic Art at UNC-Chapel Hill and a longtime member of Playmakers Repertory Company—struggles with Green’s contradictions, as I do. Ahead of the book’s August 6 publication, the INDY spoke with Hunter-Williams by phone about Green’s legacy.

INDY: You write in your essay that you would have a hard time bringing a Paul Green play to the stage today. What is it about his plays that don’t work for you?

HUNTER-WILLIAMS: I think they’re dated, and I think they’re limited in scope in terms of the emotional truth of Black Americans. I think he wrote from as truthful a place as he could. There may be writers who can adapt them. There may be directors who see something that I don’t. There may be actors and actresses who understand those roles. I’m speaking strictly for myself—as an artist, I’m really interested in moving the conversation forward.

What was Paul Green trying to do in his stories?

I think he was trying to shine a light on humanity. I think he was a humanist, and I think he was trying to foster conversations that were difficult in his day and continue to be difficult today. I would imagine that he probably butted heads with a lot of the conventional thinking. I feel like he was so ahead of his time, and yet he was a man of his time.

I’m wondering if good intentions are enough. Shouldn’t he have known better?

We live in a very different world. I don’t know that I agree that he should have known better. I think he was doing the best that he could. I think he did what he thought was right. Paul Green was highlighting social justice issues, but his characters were limited.

In your essay, you name three Black playwrights—Mary Burrill, Eulalie Spence, Angelina Weld Grimké. I’m sad to say I’ve never heard of them. You talk about the three of them in your African American theater class and you compare their work with that of Green. All three of those women were born in the late 1800s and were contemporaries of Green. How did their writing approach differ from his?

Well, they’re all products of the style and sentiment of that time period. They were writing from the perspective of being African American. They were writing from the perspective of not only facing discrimination and racism and violence but also bringing a voice of the community, truthfully from experience, into their work—which Paul Green just couldn’t do.

I think it’s time for someone to write a new full-length biography of Paul Green. There’s a lot of source material, a lot of rich material to work with. He functioned and did his type of creative work in the existing culture of racism and cultural narrowness. How he accomplished that is fascinating to me.

I do feel like he pushed the boundaries. He challenged people. And maybe this is my idealization of him, but I think if he was here with us today, he would probably be like, “Okay y’all, what is happening? How are we moving backward?” I think he might also be a little bit, like, “Yay, we’re finally starting to have these great conversations.” In some ways, we’ve moved so far forward. In some ways, we look like we’re trying to backpedal. 

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