In 1950s Chicago, three generations of Youngers live in a run-down apartment. As these black Americans struggle to overcome a variety of challenges, hope suddenly looms on the horizon. The family's matriarch is poised to receive insurance money from her husband's death.

"Originally conceived not in its present form, but as a work for the stage. I completed the first draft of the script ... the play was "postponed" and presently dropped. It was at this point that the idea for the present volume began to take shape. Work on the script had produced a form that seemed to lend itself with equal facility to the printed page, while going far beyond the inherent limitations of the stage. Work on the book and revisions of...

An African-American family tries to have a better life while living amongst poverty and racism.

Here is the story, told firsthand through electric, deeply engaged writing, of America's living theater, high and low, mainstream and experimental. Drawing on history, criticism, memoir, fiction, poetry, and parody, editor Laurence Senelick presents writers with the special knack "to distill both the immediate experience and the recollected impression, to draw the reader into the charmed circle and conjure up what has already vanished." Through the...