2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

Bonnie C. Winsbro, “Writing with Ghosts: Power through Individuation in
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior,” in Supernatural Forces: Belief,
Difference, and Power in Contemporary Works by Ethnic Women (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 154–180.
Examines the use of the supernatural in the novel and the way it challenges West-
ern and Judeo-Christian notions of reality.

Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, ed., Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: A
Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Overview of multiple ways of interpreting the novel, critical debates, and a discus-
sion of its reception. Also included is a 1977 interview with Kingston in which
she discusses the novel.

—Linda Trinh Moser

h

Tony Kushner, Angels in America:

A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

Part One: Millennium Approaches (London: National Theatre/Nick Hearn,

1992); Part Two: Perestroika (London: National Theatre/Nick Hearn, 1994)

Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist, screenwriter, opera and musical librettist,
director, and essayist Tony Kushner was born in New York City on 16 July

1956. His family soon moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he spent his
      childhood. His parents were classically trained musicians. Kushner credits his
      career in theater to his mother, whom he saw perform in local productions. He
      was set apart from other children by his Jewish background, his artistic and
      political interests, and his homosexuality, of which he was aware from age six
      and certain by eleven.
      He hid his sexual orientation from family and friends throughout his
      undergraduate career, begun in 1974 at Columbia University. While a student,
      he sought treatment for his homosexuality through psychotherapy before accept-
      ing who he was and informing those close to him. In 1981 he called his mother
      from a pay phone in New York to tell her he was gay, an event he re-created in
      Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches. While at Columbia, he read
      widely—Bertolt Brecht’s plays, the works of Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx,
      medieval literature, and classical Greek drama. He received his bachelor of arts
      degree in English literature in 1978. Six years later, he earned a master of fine arts
      degree in directing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
      Kushner has written plays since the early 1980s. In the dramatic tradition
      of Brecht, Henrik Ibsen, and George Bernard Shaw, he uses his stage to stimu-
      late thought and social discussion in audiences on such complex, controversial
      topics as religion, prejudice, power, history, hypocrisy, morality, homosexual-
      ity, AIDS, and, especially, politics; for him, “all theatre is political” (quoted in