Larry Neal

Cultural critic and playwright Larry Neal (1937–1981) was a leading member of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. He was born in Atlanta and grew up in Philadelphia, earning a BA in English and history from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He also studied folklore as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he served as the arts editor for Liberator, where he published many of his essays about art. His collections of poetry, Black Boogaloo: Notes on a Black Literature (1969) and Hoodoo Hollerin Bebop Ghosts (1971), show the influence of vernacular speech and folklore.