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    A Study Guide for Alice Childress's "Florence"
    A Study Guide for Alice Childress's "Florence"
    A Study Guide for Alice Childress's "Florence"
    Ebook36 pages24 minutes

    A Study Guide for Alice Childress's "Florence"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Alice Childress's "Florence," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 12, 2016
    ISBN9781535823395
    A Study Guide for Alice Childress's "Florence"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Alice Childress's "Florence" - Gale

      09

      Florence

      Alice Childress

      1949

      Introduction

      Childress's first play, Florence, a one-act play given her mother's name, was written in 1949 but not published until the following year in Masses & Mainstream (October 1950), a predominately communist magazine that published African American literature. Childress produced the first performance of Florence at the American Negro Theatre in New York City in 1949. The setting for the play is a segregated railroad station in which a black woman and a white woman wait for a train to take them to New York City. The play focuses on the corrosive effects of racism and stereotyping and how prevalent they were during this period. Childress uses realism to depict the prejudices that many white people had about African Americans. She also challenges ideas about what should constitute a suitable career for African American women. Florence's mother, who initially does not support her daughter's dream of becoming an actress in New York, changes her mind about her daughter's career when she is faced with the racial stereotypes put forth by a white woman. The white woman, Mrs. Carter, is so firmly entrenched in her own vision of the truth that she has no interest in learning that she is wrong. Childress's first play also reveals the difficulties that black actors face when trying to find work in the white-dominated theatrical world. Florence was first presented off Broadway by the American Negro Theatre. Childress directed and starred in this first production of the play. Florence is available in Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (1990), edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory.

      Author Biography

      Alice Childress was born either October 12, 1916, or October 12, 1920, in Charleston, South Carolina. Her birth name might have been either Herndon or Henderson, and it is thought that her mother's name was Florence. While the facts surrounding her birth and parentage are in doubt, what is known is that as a small child she was taken to New York to be raised by her grandmother. Childress, who dropped out of high school after two years, was raised in Harlem

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