Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) is generally regarded as the leading black playwright of the decade 1964-1974. His dramas, often characterized by arresting imagery, humorous but painful irony, and liberating anger, went far in exposing the fundamental racism of American life. They sought through a variety of stylistic devices to posit new myths which would return to black people a sense of themselves as their own standard of legitimacy and beauty. To the mainstream literary critics and intellectuals, Jones was an enfant terrible, gifted as a craftsman but excessively unfair in his views of whites. To nationalist oriented black intellectuals and activists, Baraka was the father of the Black Arts movement, a poet-politico who brilliantly demonstrated how culture could be a crucial weapon in a liberation struggle. Yet all such evaluations, whether made by whites or blacks, men or women, tend to disregard the fact that his dramaturgy is almost overwhelmingly male-dominated and womanhating.