This Body The Earth

by Paul Green

It is late-Reconstruction South where poverty and the exhausted earth strip even the strongest and most willful of their means to overcome the humiliations of the Civil War. Thousands of landless poor, many descended from Scots immigrants, crisscross the roads with their few chickens, bedding and an old stove in search of better wages from the landlords who exploit them and saddle them with debt. A whole people are on the move. From this unpromising soil rises one of Little Bethel's most ambitious sons. Born in the piney woods of North Carolina from a family of feckless sharecroppers, Alvin Barnes strives toward a "far-off and happier future." Through hard work, gritty determination, and a passion for knowledge, he acquires a farm and a family and raises cotton and tobacco using scientific methods. But paying off the mortgage depends on his crop yield. And then "the goad of evil, bitter days came down upon him," and Alvin cries out, "They ain't no God for the poor man, nothing but law and power over him." This Body the Earth, chronicled by Pulitzer prize-winning Paul Green, is one of the great tragic stories of the old South.

About the Author

Paul Green grew up on a cotton farm in rural Harnett County, N.C., learning the value of hard physical labor as well as the importance and beauty of literature and music. He read books in the fields as he followed a mule-drawn plow and taught himself to play the violin; he would later compose music for his own dramas.

After graduation from Buis Creek Academy, Green taught school and played semi-professional baseball until he could earn enough money to go the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, but his college educationwas interrupted by World War I. After he returned to the University, he was a key figure in the early days of the Carolina Playmakers. Among his Playmaker friends were author Thomas Wolfe, and Green's future wife, Elizabeth Lay. Green taught philosophy and drama at Chapel Hill until 1944, when he retired to devote his time to writing.

In addition to receiving the 1927 Pulitzer prize for Drama for his Broadway play In Abraham's Bosom -- remarkable for its time in its serious depiction of the plight of the American Negro in the South -- Green formulated and propagated a new dramatic form, the symphonic drama, a particular form of historical play, usually set on the very site depicted in the action, and embodying music, dance, pantomime and poetic dialogue. Following the first of these, The Last Colony (1937), about Sir Walter Raleigh's doomed colony on Roanoke Island, N.C., he wrote sixteen more. It has been said that America has contributed two important new dramatic forms, one being the musical, and the other being the symphonic drama, of which over 50 are in production around the country.

Paul Green's total literary output included not only symphonic dramas, but other plays of various types, several novels, essays, books of North Carolina folklore, and a number of cinema scripts for such prominent stars of the 1930s as Will Rogers, Bette Davis, Janet Gaynor, and others. One of his Broadway plays, an early precursor of his symphonic drama form, was the 1936 anti-war play Johnny Johnson, whose music by Kurt Weill was Weill's first American effort after his arrival from Nazi Germany. In 1941 Green worked with Richard Wright in adapting Wright's celebrated novel Native Son to the Broadway Stage.

In addition to his early Pulitzer Prize, his awards include two Guggenheim Fellowships, the National Theatre Conference Award, and nine honorary degrees. He was posthumously inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in New York in 1993, and the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 1996. All his life was active in the cultural life of North Carolina, being one of the founders of the North Carolina Symphony and the Institute of Outdoor Drama, which serves the large nationwide community of symphonic dramas that sprung up after the model of Green's original Lost Colony. His relentless battle against the death penalty has found its successors in a number of organizations active in this field in North Carolina. he traveled around the world on behalf of UNESCO lecturing about the drama and about human rights.

A year after Green's death, his colleagues and family formed the Paul Green Foundation, whose purpose is to foster his principles in the areas of creative writing, human rights and international amity by means of a series of grants and awards.

Paul Green's historical significance stems not only from his influence on the art of the drama, but apart from his influence on the social values of the South during a period when he stood almost alone in preaching the equality of the races, the richness of Southern tradition as possible source of great literature, and the perfectibility of every person, even the condemned felon.

442 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Paul Eliot Green was an American playwright best known for his historical dramas of life in North Carolina during the first decades of the twentieth century. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1927 play, In Abraham's Bosom, which was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1926-1927.

Green was also a composer, and he collaborated with Kurt Weill. His best known songs include "Oh, Heart of Love", "On the Rio Grande", "Mon Ami, My Friend" and "Johnny's Song".

Reviews

[Austin McQuade · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my home described as it is. This novel is true and the prose is great. Amazing.