The Amen Corner

A Play (Vintage International)

By: James Baldwin

Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor, Dion Graham, January LaVoy, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Janina Edwards, Aaron Goodson, Angel Pean, Shayna Small, Robin Miles, Dominic Hoffman, JD Jackson, Adenrele Ojo

Length: 5 hrs

Publisher's summary

From one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century—a masterpiece of the modern American theater: a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons.

"[Baldwin] uses words as the sea uses waves."—Langston Hughes

In his first work for the theater, James Baldwin brought all the fervor and majestic rhetoric of the storefront churches of his childhood along with an unwavering awareness of the price those churches exacted from their worshipers.

For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her Harlem congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when Margaret's estranged husband, a scapegrace jazz musician, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path.

©1968 James Baldwin (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"He is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves."—Langston Hughes

"What style! What intensity! What religious feeling!.... The man has mastered his rage and bitterness. He's a marvel!"—John Cheever