In the following interview, conducted in 1982 by D. H. Melhem and Michael Bezdek, Baraka discusses a variety of topics including his upbringing, his work, and his views on art and politics.

In the following excerpt, Brown demonstrates Baraka's poignant use of dramatic form and his careful integration of plot, character, and setting. Brown also comments on Baraka 's manipulation of such traditional forms as the morality play to criticize conventional social structures, values, and beliefs.

In the following essay, Piggford explores Baraka's psychological analysis of black American men in Dutchman.

Jones has named specific influences on his development as a writer. They include T. S. Eliot (especially on Jones' earlier, "academic" poetry), Ezra Pound (especially for imagery), William Carlos Williams (especially for a sense of speech in poetry), and Federico Garcia Lorca (for, among other things, helping him break from the Eliot influence). [Nathanael West, Mark Twain, and Eugene O'Neill may also be considered influences.] (p. 57) It is safe to say that all the writers who g...

In the following interview, Baraka discusses his work as a director and his views on directing.

In the following interview with Sandra G. Shannon, Baraka explores his own vision as director of his dramas.

In the following review, which originally appeared in The New York Review on February 6, 1964, Ellison points to both positive and negative aspects of Blues People.

In the following essay, Shannon illustrates how Baraka drew upon myths, traditional symbols, popular literature, and established institutions in Black Mass.

Below, Tener claims that "The Toilet" explores the negative affects of white society on the maturing process of black boys.

In the following review, Gates outlines The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones.

In the following chapter excerpt, Lacey states that race is not a central theme of "The Toilet" and Baraka's involvement with the Beat movement is evident.

In the following interview, Baraka discusses his magazine, Yugen, his poetry, and his various literary influences.

In the essay, below Baraka discusses the commercialization of American theatre and the role of the Black theatre as an alternative to traditional American theatre.

In the excerpt below, Benston explores Baraka's use of music throughout his work, especially in "Slave Ship. "

The fear which pervades LeRoi Jones's work is that of a loss of identity—a fear which becomes socially relevant when extended to the scale of racial assimilation. In this context violence functions … as a means of discovering and forging identity…. [Jones's] is a sensitivity, created by the extremes of racial guilt and discrimination, which can see no middle ground between man as victim and man as rebel…. While the violence which emerges as the strongest mark of Jon...

In the following review, Wallenstein provides a positive assessment of Transbluency.

In the following essay, a reprint of the original which appeared in Liberator in 1965, Baraka outlines the goals and responsibilities of Black Revolutionary Theatre.

In the following excerpt from her Staging Masculinity, McDonough studies Baraka's treatment of black manhood in his works.

Tener refutes the widely-held belief that the title of Baraka 's play "Dutchman, " refers to the legend of the Flying Dutchman.

In the following excerpt, Brecht explores the images in Baraka's play, "Slave Ship."

In the following excerpt, Keyssar argues that Baraka has portrayed the main characters of "Dutchman" realistically, not just symbolically, thereby intensifying their effect on the audience.

Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, has lost none of his fury since the Black Power movement of the 1960's. He has, however, sacrificed artistic vitality on the altar of his political faith. Selected by Baraka, the work gathered in ["Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones" and "Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones"] is offered as a summation of his creative life…. The change revealed in Baraka's style over the years is dramatic—fro...

In the following review, Ramsey offers a mixed assessment of The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues.

Fifty years from now when negroes and others take "English,"… they'll read: LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) was at the cutting edge of mid-twentieth century American literature. Black Arts and Black Consciousness and Black Liberation will be explained away in a footnote like Harlem (a Negro area in New York) in the Norton Anthology of Literature. The process of cultural cannibalism, until now confined to black music, speech and dress, will have been extended to Afro-American liter...

In the review below, Barnes outlines the political message of "Slave Ship," and praises Baraka's provocative delivery of his black militant outlook.

In the following article, Reck examines archetypal symbolism in "Dutchman," and argues that Baraka's play pities the white world, leaving Lula stuck in it and setting Clay free through death.

In this excerpt, which appeared originally in Sollers' book Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism," the critic calls "The Toilet" a play about race and acceptance for blacks in a white world.

In the following excerpt, Oliver praises the "deadly wit and passionate wild comedy " of "Dutchman, " but felt that the anger expressed by the black character, while justifiable, was ineffective.

In the following excerpt, Bain calls "The Toilet" "straight bathroom drama, with little if any plot and absolutely no uplift."

In the following excerpt, Taubman calls Jones an angry and gifted playwright.

In this review of "The Toilet, " Hewes finds that while the gratuitous violence and obscenities may scare off many viewers, the play is nonetheless "a vivid and indelible work of art."

[Baraka's] poems and plays have explored the subjective effects of the dominant whites' violation of black mentality, and at the same time have acted out psychologically and in fantasy the politics of intransigeant confrontation. No American poet since Pound has come closer to making poetry and politics reciprocal forms of action. That is not necessarily a good thing. When the reciprocity comes out of the very nature of the language and feeling that engage the poet, when it amounts to a discov...

Clurman finds "Slave Ship " a masterpiece of living theater.

Maybe humanism is not an adequate stand from which to review Amiri Baraka's political diatribe "S-1." Maybe devotion to a just perspective, temperate weighing of evidence, and fairness are luxuries that can no longer be afforded in our oppressed and ravaged society…. But if the situation in America were as bad, or even potentially as bad, as Baraka suggests, then there would be no call for this critique or this critic: We would have lost the battle for civility, compassion, and t...

In the following unfavorable review, Simon condemns what he considers to be an overtly allegorical plot, simplistic symbols, and pretentious language in "Dutchman."

LeRoi Jones is already familiar to New Yorkers as the author of some sensational little plays, and to readers of poetry as the author of some sensational little poems, and if his book [Blues People: Negro Music in White America] fails to be sensational, it is not because he has tried to keep it from being so, but because his accommodation of his subject has been couched—bedded down, in fact—in that language of all languages most refractory to sensationalism: the latest jargon of the social sci...

[In Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note], where the poems are arranged chronologically, one can see even as the chaff flies that the grain is good. [Jones's] special gift is an emotive music that might have made him predominantly a "lyric poet," but his deeply felt preoccupation with more than personal issues enlarges the scope of his poems beyond what the term is often taken to mean…. I feel that sometimes his work is muddled, and that after the event he convinces himself th...

The inclusion of the 1967 work Slave Ship alongside the recent The Motion of History (1976) and S-I (1976) in [The Motion of History and Other Plays] reveals Baraka's movement from the view of what he terms "the petty bourgeois of the oppressed nationality," represented by Slave Ship, to a Marxist orientation, represented by The Motion of History and S-I. After ten years Slave Ship remains a powerful document of mid-1960s Afro-American consciousness. White slavers cannot destroy the Afr...

[Sidney Poet Heroical is] a slick, semi-musical satire of Sidney Poitier. In fact, Baraka's play attacks all blacks who "make it big" in white society, forget their roots, and begin to think, talk, and live "white." Much of Baraka's characterization is funny and effective: his portrait of Sidney's egotistical, ruthless buddy and mentor who prances across the stage in knee-high boots, skin-tight pants, and shirts invariably open to subnavel levels, and his whi...

Hard Facts is a self-consciously communist poetry book, right down to the red cover with the silhouettes of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao on the back. Baraka's consciousness is committed to class struggle and his poetics is materialist, but it too often falls short of dialectics…. [There] is the bad mouthing of the phonies with a hot stream of scream-of-consciousness hip talk mixed with revolutionary exhortations. All of which breaks our ear rather than sings to our needs. An atheist preacher i...