Background
He was born on March 17, 1894 in Buies Creek, North Carolina.
He was born on March 17, 1894 in Buies Creek, North Carolina.
Green studied playwriting under Frederick Henry Koch at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Paul Green began his theatrical career with a series of one-act plays and followed these with In Abraham's Bosom (1926); this sympathetic study of a mulatto's valiant but unsuccessful efforts to improve his cultural status was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1927. His next play, The Field God (1927), pictures the religious struggle between a pantheistic farmer and his orthodox wife.
Tread the Green Grass (1929) is a symbolic fantasy about a country girl who goes mad through dreams and fears. In 1931 Green turned, in The House of Connelly, to a study of the disintegration of the landed Southern aristocracy in the face of the rising working class, and in Roll, Sweet Chariot (1934) he again gave a realistic account of black life. His Johnny Johnson (1936), which he wrote in collaboration with composer Kurt Weill, combines music and symbolism to tell the unhappy story of a soldier in World War I. Green's other plays include The Enchanted Maze (1939); The Highland Call (1941); Native Son (1941), which he wrote with Richard Wright, author of the original novel; The Sheltering Plaid (1965); and Drumbeats in Georgia (1973). Green also wrote several symphonic dramas--historical dramas performed outdoors--including The Lost Colony (1937), The Common Glory (1948), The Founders (1957), and The Confederacy (1958). His prolific output includes books of essays such as Plough and Furrow (1963), as well as many novels, shorts stories, songbooks, and both radio and screen plays.