For both Trouble No More and Bombingham,
Grooms won the Lillian Smith Prize for Fiction
(1996, 2002). He has received Wesleyan College’s
Lamar Lectureship and an Arts Administration
Fellowship from the National Endowment for the
Arts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Grooms, Anthony. Bombingham. New York: Free
Press, 2001.
———. Trouble No More. Palo Alto, Calif.: LaQuesta
Press, 1995.
Margaret Whitt
Gunn, William (Bill) Harrison
(1934–1989)
Playwright, actor, filmmaker, screenwriter, and
novelist William (Bill) Harrison Gunn became a
respected, admired, and versatile artist and broke
new ground in the area of black independent film.
He was born on July 15, 1934, in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, where he grew up in a middle-class
environment with creative parents and attended
integrated public schools. His father, William Har-
rison, also known as Bill Gunn, was a songwriter,
musician, comedian, and unpublished poet. Lou-
ise Alexander Gunn, his mother, was an actress
and a beauty contest winner who ran her own
theater group, where Gunn got an early taste for
drama. He served for a short time in the U.S. Navy
and then moved to New York, where he became
an actor.
Gunn’s career in the performing arts began in
the 1950s. He appeared in Member of the Wedding
(1950), The Immoralist (1954), Take a Giant Step
(1954), Sign of Winter (1958), The Sound and the
Fury (1959), Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1962), The
Interns (1962), Anthony and Cleopatra, The Win-
ter’s Tale (1963), The Spy with My Face (1966), and
later in Losing Ground (1982). During this time, he
also appeared in such popular television series and
films as American Parade, Danger, The Fugitive, Dr.
Kildare, The Interns, Outer Limits, Route 66, Stoney
Burke, Tarzan, and The Cosby Show.
After Gunn saved up enough money as a
Broadway and off-Broadway performer, he began
a parallel career as a playwright and a writer; this
provided him with the opportunity to steadily de-
velop a degree of racial consciousness and explore
issues of racial identity in his plays and novels. De-
void of racial overtones or issues, Gunn’s first stage
play, Marcus in the High Grass (1958), featured two
white actors in the leading roles; consequently,
some critics believed he was a white playwright.
Marcus was followed by his 1972 Emmy Award–
winning one-act play, Johnnas (1968), which fo-
cuses on the role of the black artist in a crass world.
Gunn next wrote two musicals, Black Picture Show
(1975), for which he received two AUDELCO
awards for best playwright and best play of the
year, and Rhinestone Sharecropping (1982); both
were adapted from his novels with the same titles.
Three years later, his Family Employment (1985)
was produced, and he was cast in the leading role
in his The Forbidden City (1989), produced by the
New York Shakespeare Festival.
Gunn launched his career as a novelist in the
mid-1960s, largely to supplement his income as an
actor. Like his stage plays and several screenplays,
his semiautobiographical novels address such
broader themes as personal development and self-
discovery, especially of the artist in conflict with
society. Rooted in the French existentialist phi-
losophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus,
Gunn’s first novel, the bildungsroman All the
Rest Have Died (1964), chronicles a young man’s
quest for a successful, meaningful life; Black Pic-
ture Show (1975) depicts an artist whose standards
are compromised, and Rhinestone Sharecropping
(1981) portrays the black artist at odds with rac-
ism, greed, and commercialism.
Although many companies and studios re-
sisted serious films about black culture, confining
themselves, during the late 1960s and 1970s, to
exploitation movies, Gunn wrote for movies and
television. He was, according to film critic Melvin
Donalson, among the handful of filmmakers and
actors who moved beyond Hollywood’s “formulaic
predictability” to offer alternative black images and
create “ ‘art’ outside the Hollywood system” (6).218 Gunn, William (Bill) Harrison