Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones]’s 1964 play
Dutchmanput the twenty-nine-year-old writer on the map. It is, in the words of critic Werner Sollors, “Baraka’s most familiar as well as his most intensely analyzed and highly praised play” and “synonymous with Baraka’s fame as a ‘protest writer’ in the 1960s” (Sollors 1978: 117). Baraka had already been a fixture on the Greenwich Village beat and bohemian scene since the late 1950s, when he and his first wife, Hettie Cohen, founded Totem Press and the magazine
Yugen, important outlets for beat and New York School writing. Baraka’s own work had been included in Donald Allen’s influential 1960 anthology
The New American Poetry, and the following year he began printing the
Floating Bearnewsletter with fellow poet Diane di Prima.
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Citation: Fazzino, Jimmy. "Dutchman". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 September 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5474, accessed 23 November 2024.]
