Alice Childress

For the Ben Folds Five song, see Alice Childress (song).
Alice Childress
Born
Alice Herndon

(1916-10-12)October 12, 1916
Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.
DiedAugust 14, 1994(1994-08-14) (aged 77)
New York City, U.S.
Other namesLouise Henderson
Occupations
  • Playwright
  • novelist
  • actress
Notable workLike One of the Family (1956); A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973)
Spouses
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​
(m. 1934; div. 1957)​
  • Nathan Woodard

Alice Childress (October 12, 1916[1] – August 14, 1994) was an American novelist, playwright, and actress, acknowledged as "the only African-American woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades."[2] Childress described her work as trying to portray the have-nots in a have society,[3] saying: "My writing attempts to interpret the 'ordinary' because they are not ordinary. Each human is uniquely different. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvellously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne."[4] Childress became involved in social causes, and formed an off-Broadway union for actors.[5]

Alice Childress's paper archive is held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York.[6]

  1. ^ "PAL: Perspectives in American Literature-A Research and Reference Guide". Archived from the original on 2006-04-19. Retrieved 2006-02-25.
  2. ^ Mary Helen Washington, "Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front", in Bill Mullen and James Edward Smethurst (eds), Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003, p. 186.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference BHN was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Busby was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, Trudier Harris, "Childress, Alice", The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 72.
  6. ^ "archives.nypl.org – Alice Childress papers". archives.nypl.org. Retrieved February 16, 2019.