Charles H. Fuller Jr. is an American playwright. He was born March 5, 1939, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Fuller was driven to become a writer after he noticed that his high school library had no books written by African-American authors. Many of Fuller’s plays center around the African-Amercian experience in the USA. Fuller attended Villanova University from 1956-1958 and then served in the U.S. Army in Japan and South Koren from 1959-1962. Fuller left the military in 1962 and pursued a Doctor of Fine Arts at La Salle University. Charles Fuller is also the co-founded the Afro-American Arts Theatre Philadelphia.
Fuller achieved critical notoriety in 1969 with his play The Village: A Party, which centred around racial tensions in a group of mixed-race couples. Fuller began writing plays for the Negro Ensemble Company and the Henry Street Settlement theatre. Fuller wrote The Brownsville Raid in 1975, his first piece about black soldiers, and he won an Obie Award in 1980 for his play, Zooman and The Sign. In 1981, Fuller revisited his Army background with A Soldier’s Play, which centred around the murder of a black army captain on a racially-tense army base in Louisiana. A Soldier’s Play won Fuller a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and was adapted by Fuller into a screenplay, A Soldier’s Story (1984), which was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Writers Guild of America Award, and won an Edgar Award. Fuller switched his focus to movies following his success with A Soldier’s Story, writing screenplays and working as a film producer. Charles Fuller is the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, State of New York, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
More about Charles Fuller
