[Paul Green has] evolved a type of lyrical folk drama unlike anything that has so far been written in this country. Such plays as The End of the Row and In Abraham's Bosom are as firmly rooted in the soil of the South as Deep River or Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. The more I read of his most significant work, the more firmly am I convinced that Mr. Green is doing for our drama what the writers of the spirituals have done for Negro music. I think our theater has found here an artist of rare gifts. I must ...

America's "folk-drama" of the 1920's and 1930's appears a last stand of nineteenth-century regionalism…. [It] was a brief movement which capitalized on the quaintness and charm, the eccentricity and even grotesqueness, of character, dialect, and setting. There was some necessary superficiality in a tradition that relied too much on entertaining a sophisticated cosmopolitan audience with a parade of characters—or caricatures—from a province. Another rat...

Recognized as a present writer of the outdoor pageant play (in his words, "symphonic drama") and a past writer of regional, "folk," and experimental drama, Paul Green is another of those dramatists such as T. S. Eliot and Tennessee Williams who have turned to myth in search of universal meanings…. Green's plays written between 1920 (The Last of the Lowries) and 1934 (Roll Sweet Chariot) show a progress from folk materials and realistic manner toward a blend of folk-...

Paul Green's work is still very much in progress. A man of abundant energy and vitality, he has a rich store of as yet unrealized dreams and ideas. His work has shown both consistency and the power to expand: consistency in the underlying theme of compassion for and championship of those who are denied basic human rights; expansion in enlarging these themes to an application beyond the bounds of locality. From a point of view so near to a living writer, it is impossible to say whether or not his book...

As I ponder [the performance of In Abraham's Bosom] it seems moving and profound. Certainly the course of its struggle is full of tragic despair…. There is, too, a certain wise balance of parts in the dramatic elements; the white people mean to be kind, but they are as lost in the midst of a race situation as the Negro is; they are moved now by human or affectionate impulse and now by a blind racial instinct and an arbitrary, desperate sense of self-preservation. The climaxes in the play are s...

The fact of "class" was one that few American dramatists escaped in the thirties; man was primarily a social, not a psychological, animal. Thus Paul Green in his drama of southern decadence, The House of Connelly (1931), is less concerned with the forms of this decadence than with the juxtaposition of a healthy alternative. (p. 84) We might profitably contrast the south of House of Connelly with the south of Tennessee Williams. As Green paints the decay of the old order it seems to be, at firs...

Ever since such fine and gripping one-acts as "The No 'Count Boy" and "Lonesome Road" [Paul Green] has been winning a wide and enthusiastic public for himself, achieving the rare prestige of being constantly compared to and mentioned with Eugene O'Neill…. He was hailed as a white hope, and had justified the faith of his admirers by his relentless, often beautiful, and almost always powerful one-act dramas of folk and Negro life in the Carolinas. Unfortunately...

Mr. Green is coming of age at last, and to say that his play ["The House of Connelly"] is by far the most interesting presented this season on Broadway would be to say much too little. As a whole it is very, very good; in places it reveals writing as fine as it has ever been my privilege to admire in an American drama, and today we may safely speak not of "promise" but of accomplishment. Hitherto Mr. Green has never sufficiently emerged as an individual from the group of which he...

In spite of the structural defects that result from Mr. Green's attempt to impose the technique of the theatre upon the technique of the novel, ["This Body the Earth"] is an outstanding addition to the literature of social protest that is being written by Southern writers. The story of "This Body the Earth" is simple enough. Alvin Barnes is the son of a trifling, shiftless, holy-rolling cropper. He realizes, as a young boy, that there can be a decency and dignity to human ...

So much of Paul Green's work has concerned Negroes that his name is identified with his powerful ability to portray the experiences of black people. We who have spent our lives with them thick around us, seeing them constantly, hearing what they say day after day, have had our ears sharpened to their speech and our eyes guided to see deeper into the secret places of their hearts by what Paul Green has written about them. A few Negroes, part white, part black, have places in his "Wide Fields,&#...