Only a boy preacher who had grown up to become one of America's most eminent writers could have produced a play like The Amen Corner. To 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.

The Amen Corner is a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons. It is a scalding, uplifting, sorrowful, and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater.