Paul Green

Paul Eliot Green (March 17, 1894 – May 4, 1981) was an American playwright whose work includes 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.

His play The Lost Colony has been regularly produced since 1937 near Manteo, North Carolina, and the historic colony of Roanoke. Its success has resulted in numerous other historical outdoor dramas being produced; his work is still the longest-running. Born in Buies Creek, in Harnett County, near Lillington, North Carolina, Green was educated at Buies Creek Academy. (It developed as what is now known as Campbell University). He went on to study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he joined the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies and the Carolina Playmakers. Green also studied at Cornell University.

Green first attracted attention with his 1925 one-act play The No 'Count Boy, which was produced by the New York Theatre Club. The next year his full-length play In Abraham's Bosom (1926) was produced by the Provincetown Players and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play was considered remarkable for its depiction of African Americans in the South. Its hero, a man of mixed-race ancestry, finds his idealistic attempts to better the lives of the African Americans around him doomed to failure. With this success, Green was recognized as one of the leading regional voices in the American theatre. His plays were often compared with the folk plays of Irish playwright John Millington Synge. This included his 1926 play, The Last of the Lowries, a fictional account of Henry Berry Lowry, a mixed-race leader of the Lumbee people during and after the Civil War.Green's The House of Connelly was a tragedy of the decline of an old Southern family. It was chosen by the newly formed Group Theatre for its inaugural production. Often compared to Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in its contrast of aristocratic decay and parvenu energy, The House of Connelly was praised by critic Joseph Wood Krutch as Green's finest play to date.