A Southern Life: Letters of Paul Green, 1916-1981.

• Author: Egerton, John
• Position: Brief Article

It is probably no mere coincidence that the image of the University of North Carolina as a bastion of liberalism in the reactionary South first gained wide currency in the 1920s, when Paul Green started teaching on the Chapel Hill campus. A Tarheel country boy who graduated from UNC and then spent virtually all of his long and productive professional life there, Green was that most rare and admirable of white Southerners, a person who from an early age understood and accepted the common humanity of the species.

As a playwright, Green was enormously prolific over a span of nearly six decades. One of his earliest dramas, In Abraham's Bosom, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1927, and he went on to write scores of other compositions, among them an adaptation of Richard Wright's novel Native Son for the Broadway stage. Green is probably best remembered for sixteen symphonic dramas" celebrating the history and traditions of an America intently marching, as he saw it, on a progressive path to its destiny. Several of these dramas were still being staged in outdoor theaters from Florida to Texas when Paul Green died in 1981.

Green was a great talker and letterwriter, too; Laurence G. Avery's admirably meticulous and painstaking effort to distill the essence of the expansive Carolinian's voluminous correspondence shows that. If the dramatist's stage productions hadn't made clear...