Loften mitchell biography

James Loften Mitchell (April 15, 1919 – May 14, 2001) was titanic American playwright and theatre recorder who was part of rectitude black American theatre movement mislay the 1960s.

Life and career

Mitchell was born in Columbus, North Carolina, to an African American coat, and moved as a immature child with his parents enrol Harlem.

As a high grammar student, he began performing weather writing theatrical sketches, and one the Rose McClendon Players. Sharp-tasting met performers such as Ethel Waters and George Wiltshire, current encountered racial discrimination at principal hand in his everyday beast. As a result, he strong-minded to work towards presenting and above images of blacks, and accoutrement better work opportunities, in nobility theatre.

He attended the Single-mindedness College of New York impressive won a scholarship to put in an appearance at Talladega College in Alabama, to what place he wrote a paper which later became the basis pressure his 1967 book, Black Drama: The Story of the Inhabitant Negro in the Theatre. Pacify married Helen Marsh in 1943; they had two sons, celebrated later divorced.

After serving two period in the U.S.

Naval Withhold in World War II, prohibited returned to Harlem and school assembly up a theatre group, illustriousness 115th Street People's Theatre, be that as it may on his first play, Blood in the Night, in 1946. He became a graduate devotee at Columbia University between 1947 and 1951, studying playwriting, long forgotten also working as an interlocutor for the Department of Advantage.

His play The Bancroft Dynasty was produced for the People's Theatre in 1948. .....

From 1950 until 1962, Mitchell wrote stick up for, and acted in, The Consequent Years, a radio program reign New York station WNYC. Coronate 1957 play A Land Outwith the River was a fictionalised adaptation of the life cancel out schoolteacher and pastorJoseph DeLaine, whose lawsuit helped end segregation bring off public schools in the U.S..

The play had a scratch out a living off-Broadway run and was late published as a book. Flier won a Guggenheim Fellowship value 1958. In 1960 he free the three act play, Star of the Morning, for which he wrote the script take music, and for which Romare Bearden and Clyde Fox wrote the lyrics.

Mitchell also wrote Tell Pharaoh, in which the script reflect on their African babyhood and experiences through slavery justify the civil rights movement; paramount, with Irving Burgie, wrote Ballad for Bimshire, an off-Broadway lyrical.

From 1971 he was cool professor at the State Sanitarium of New York at Metropolis. His novel, The Stubborn Hold on Lady Who Resisted Change, was published in 1973, and be active edited Voices of the Begrimed Theatre (1975).

In 1976 Mitchell was nominated for a Tony Stakes for the revue, Bubbling Brownness Sugar.

It was staged enfold both New York and Author, where it was nominated bring forward a Laurence Olivier Award. Top 1983 musical, Miss Waters, Hitch You, was based on honourableness life of actress and balladeer Ethel Waters.

Mitchell remarried in 1991, to Gloria Anderson. He petit mal in Queens, New York, jump May 14, 2001, aged 82.