Neal, Larry

September 5, 1937
January 6, 1981

The writer Larry Neal, one of the most prominent figures of the black arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, was born in Atlanta, graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1961, and received an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963. He soon became one of the most prominent of the African-American writers that emerged in the early 1960s championing the search for a distinctive African-American aesthetic. His early articles, including "The Negro in the Theatre" (1964) and "Cultural Front" (1965), were among the earliest to assert that separate cultural forms are necessary in the development of black artists in a racist society.

Neal developed his perspective on black art in the influential anthology Black Fire (1968), coedited with Amiri Baraka, and the essay "The Black Arts Movement" (1968), which helped give a name and direction to the nascent artistic trend. Neal argued that the purpose of black arts was to effect a "radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic" in part through a purging of the external European and white American cultural influences from black artistic expression. His critical thinking was further developed in books such as Black Boogaloo: Notes on Black Liberation (1969), Trippin' a Need for Change (1969, coauthored with Amiri Baraka and journalist A. B. Spellman), and Hoodoo Hollerin Bebop Ghosts (1971). Neal also authored plays (The Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn, 1976), screenplays (Holler S.O.S., 1971; Moving on Up, 1973), and television scripts (Lenox Avenue Sunday, 1966; Deep River, 1967).

Neal was an instructor at the City College of New York from 1968 to 1969, and he subsequently taught at Wesleyan University (1969–1970) and Yale University (1970–1975). By the mid-1970s he was reconsidering his view of black culture. In "The Black Contribution to American Letters" (1976), he argued that while all African-American writers and literature must in some sense be political, it was important to separate the public persona of black writers from their specific private experiences, which are often wider and more inclusive than the polemical rejection of nonblack influences that characterized the black arts movement. Neal's later works include the play In an Upstate Motel, which premiered in New York in 1981. He died of a heart attack in Hamilton, New York, in 1981.

See also Baraka, Amiri (Jones, LeRoi); Black Arts Movement

Bibliography

Anadolu-Okur, Nilgun. Contemporary African American Theater: Afrocentricity in the Works of Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, and Charles Fuller. New York: Garland, 1997.

Martin, Reginald. "Total Life Is What We Want: The Progressive Stages of the New Black Aesthetic in Literature." South Atlantic Review (November 1986): 46–67.

Neal, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement." Drama Review 12 (Summer 1968).

Neal, Larry. "The Black Contribution to American Letters: Part II, The Writer as Activist—1960 and After." In The Black American Reference Book, edited by Mabel M. Smythe. Engel-wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976.

Neal, Larry. "The Negro in the Theatre." Drama Critique 7 (Spring 1964).

Van Deburg, William L. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

reginald martin (1996)
Updated bibliography