he would drop out before graduating. He joined
the U.S. Navy, serving from 1952 to 1955. While
in the navy, where he won a lightweight boxing
championship, Bullins embarked on a self-educa-
tion program through reading. After his discharge
in 1958, he moved to Los Angeles; earned his grad-
uate equivalency diploma; began writing fiction,
essays, and poetry; and resumed his formal studies
at Los Angeles City College. In 1964 he moved to
the San Francisco Bay area and, while registered in
a college writing program at San Francisco State
College, he began writing plays because, as he later
explained, “I came to realize that only closed circles
of African Americans read fiction.”
Although he would later go on to earn a bach-
elor of arts from Antioch University in 1989 and
an M.F.A. from San Francisco State University in
1994, Bullins, in the late 1960s, emerged as one of
the leading and most prolific playwrights of the
BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, whose leaders sought to
define a genuinely BLACK AESTHETIC based on the
politics of BLACK NATIONALISM and a skillful re-
construction of African-American folklore. This
movement was spearheaded by ADDISON GAYLE,
LARRY NEAL, NIKKI GIOVANNI, SONIA SANCHEZ,
AMIRI BARAKA, and HOYT FULLER, among others.
In “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” Fuller explains that
during the 1960s black writers desired a system of
isolating and evaluating the artistic works of Afri-
can Americans that reflect the special character and
imperatives of their experiences. For Fuller, these
writers created, through the Black Arts Movement,
a way of perceiving African-American art forms
as containing more than aesthetic beauty, as de-
manded by European aesthetics. Their functional
art would be a liberating force through which Af-
rican Americans could reclaim their personal and
cultural beauty through their art. Neal argued, in
“Visions of a Liberated Future,” that drama was a
prime vehicle for achieving the specific goals of the
Black Aesthetic.
As a dramatist, Bullins was strongly influenced
by the major tenets and themes of the Black Arts
Movement, including beauty, love, power, and
revolution. He, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and
ELDRIDGE CLEAVER founded Black House, a mili-
tant cultural-political organization, and he briefly
aligned himself with the Black Panther Party,
where he was appointed minister of culture. Al-
though Bullins wanted to promote Kawaida, the
cultural nationalism championed by MAULANA
KARENGA, other Black Panther members wanted a
more revolutionary ideology promoted in African-
American art, one that called for armed rebellion.
In August 1965, Bullins made his theatrical
debut in San Francisco at the Firehouse Repertory
Theater with three one-act plays: How Do You Do,
Dialect Determinism or The Rally, and Clara’s Ole’
Man. Although he initially considered leaving the
United States following his philosophical disagree-
ment with Eldridge Cleaver, Bullins moved to New
York City to become playwright in residence and
associate director at Robert Macbeth’s New Lafay-
ette Theater in Harlem. He also headed the New
Lafayette’s Black Theater Workshop and edited its
Black Theater Magazine. For the next 10 years Bul-
lins became one of the most powerful and contro-
versial voices on the off-Broadway stage and, along
with Baraka and Neal, one of the most influential
playwrights of the Black Arts Movement. Later, he
also directed the Writer’s Unit Playwrights Work-
shop for Joseph Papp at the Public Theater and the
Playwrights Workshop at Woodie King’s New Fed-
eral Theater in New York City.
Bullins is perhaps best known for his first full-
length play, In the Wine Time (1968), which ex-
amines the scarcity of options available to African
Americans, especially the urban poor. It became
the first in a series of plays focused on a group of
young friends growing up in America in the 1950s,
which he called the Twentieth Century Cycle. The
other plays in this cycle are The Corner (1968), In
New England Winter (1969), The Duplex (1970),
The Fabulous Miss Marie (1971), Homeboy (1976),
and Daddy (1977). His other notable works in-
clude Goin’ A Buffalo (1968); Salaam, Huey New-
ton, Salaam (1991); The Hungered One (1971), a
collection of stories; and Reluctant Rapist (1973),
a novel. In Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography (1977),
Samuel Hay describes Bullins as a playwright with
a revolutionary bent who, despite this inclination,
became an artist who has displayed some of the
more deeply ignored representations of African-
American life.82 Bullins, Ed