SOURCE: An obituary in The New York Times, August 19, 1994, p. A24.

[In the following, Rule provides a brief overview of Childress's career.]

Alice Childress, an actress and a writer of plays and novels, including A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, died on Sunday at Astoria General Hospital in Queens. She was 77 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was cancer, said her husband, Nathan Woodard.

In 1973, in a review of A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich in The New York Times, the playwright Ed Bullins wrote: "There are too few books that convince us that reading is one of the supreme gifts of being human. Alice Childress, in her short, brilliant study of a 13-year-old black heroin user, achieves this feat in a masterly way."

In the mid-1970's, the book was at the center of a controversy when a Long Island school district banned it and...