1. William Alexander Attaway was an African-American novelist, short story writer, essayist, songwriter, playwright, and screenwriter.
22 Facts About William Attaway
1. 2.
In Chicago, William Attaway showed little interest in school until he was assigned a poem written by Langston Hughes.
3.
Once he learned that Hughes was a black poet, William Attaway decided to start applying himself to his school work.
4.
William Attaway even enjoyed writing so much that he wrote for his sister Ruth's amateur dramatic groups.
5.
William Attaway was married in 1962 to a woman named Frances Settele.
6.
Frances William Attaway was a white woman originally from New York.
7.
Frances and William Attaway moved their family to the Caribbean to escape racial turmoil and death threats.
8.
William Attaway took part in the March 7,1965 Bloody Sunday voting rights demonstrations in Selma, Alabama.
9.
William Attaway was working on a screenplay for The Atlanta Child Murders television series when he suffered a heart attack.
10.
William Attaway died on June 17,1986, of heart failure, aged 74.
11.
In 1935, William Attaway began working on his first project as he helped to write the Federal Writers' Project guide to Illinois.
12.
William Attaway then moved to New York, where his drama Carnival was produced.
13.
William Attaway then began working on his second and last novel, Blood on the Forge.
14.
William Attaway and Irving Burgie co-wrote the famous song "Day-O" for calypso singer Harry Belafonte.
15.
William Attaway was the first African American to write scripts for film and TV.
16.
William Attaway wrote for programs such as Wide Wide World and Colgate Hour.
17.
George P Weick in Harlem Renaissance Lives points out that in 1967, Attaway published for children a compilation of representative popular music in America, including historical commentary, Hear America Singing.
18.
William Attaway further expresses although its subject matter was romantic love, it remained a favorite of both Pilgrims and Puritans.
19.
William Attaway is credited as the screenwriter for the 1981 race-relations TV movie Grambling's White Tiger, directed by Roots actor Georg Stanford Brown.
20.
William Attaway often kept the main themes of his writing about racial and ecological crisis, especially in his novel Blood on the Forge.
21.
In Blood on the Forge, William Attaway depicts the hardship of the black community during The Great Migration, which William Attaway experienced firsthand when his family moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1916.
22.
William Attaway retains an important place among African-American writers of the early 20th century; the reprinting of Blood on the Forge in 1993 has brought renewed critical and popular attention to his writing.