Roark Bradford

Roark Whitney Wickliffe Bradford, born August 21, 1896, in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, was an American short story writer, novelist, and Broadway book writer who died on November 13, 1948. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, and served as a first lieutenant in the Coast Artillery during World War I. Bradford later worked as night city editor for the New Orleans Times-Picayune before establishing himself as a fiction writer whose work appeared in publications including Collier's, Harper's, and the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Bradford relocated from a Tennessee plantation to Cabot, Arkansas in 1910, and he later claimed that his upbringing on a plantation gave him intimate knowledge of African American life. That characterization, along with the portrayals of Black characters throughout his body of work, drew criticism from scholars including Sterling Allen Brown, who argued that Bradford's typologies perpetuated racist stereotypes. Since the 1940s, much of his writing has been reevaluated on those grounds.

His 1928 collection Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun served as the source material for Marc Connelly's stage adaptation The Green Pastures, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Bradford's own stage adaptation of his 1931 novel John Henry opened in New York City in 1940, representing his Broadway credit as a book writer. Among his other published works are This Side of Jordan (1929), Ol' King David an' the Philistine Boys (1930), Kingdom Coming (1933), Let the Band Play Dixie (1934), and The Three-Headed Angel (1937). Bradford received the O. Henry Award in 1927.

In his personal life, Bradford married Lydia Sehorn, with whom he had one son, Richard Bradford, before the couple divorced in July 1933. He subsequently married Mary Rose Sciarra Himler, also a writer, in Carlsbad, New Mexico. During World War II he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve Bureau of Aeronautics Training, including a posting in French West Africa in 1943. In 1946 he accepted a visiting lectureship in the English department at Tulane University in New Orleans. Bradford died of amoebiasis on November 13, 1948, a disease believed to have been contracted during his wartime service in French West Africa. His cremated remains were spread over the Mississippi River.