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BOOK REVIEW                    CLARKE

their vivid humanity, their superb sense of energy, under direction, and their utter individual honesty. With this sharing they found the voice to project their message.

The Watts Writers' Workshop had a slow and uncertain beginning, and there were times when its founder, Budd Schulberg, thought that it would never get off the ground. The community of Watts, in the days following the police-provoked violence, seemed to be the wrong place for any white man to be dispensing anything that appeared to be benevolence.

On Friday, the 13th of August, 1965, the Watts district of Los Angeles exploded. Millions of white Americans were shocked again over a condition that they created and thought they could control. A new and terrible awareness had shocked some Americans into silence and some into action. One of those was Budd Schulberg, novelist, screenwriter, and Los Angeles resident. His efforts resulted in the establishment of the Watts Writers' Workshop, an extraordinary creative writing project. Through Schulberg and the mass media, the Workshop achieved nationwide acclaim, without having a large number of student writers. The students came in slowly, almost one at a time, and they were not ready to accept the teacher's explanation of his motives.

The story of the founding of the Workshop is as interesting as some of the stories that came out of it. Soon after the riots started, Budd Schulberg and a columnist friend drove out of the plush and phony atmosphere of Beverly Hills to investigate what the disturbance was about. They were objective and naive. There was no understanding of what was happening until Schulberg acknowledged his confusion and started a dialogue with himself.

"'What the hell is going on down there?'
"I didn't know. The more I watched the more I realized that I had no idea what was going on down there. Or if I knew the what, I could make only an educated guess at the why. But I knew it only in my head. And it wasn't something one could read up on in books. I had read my share, from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, to Dr. Clark's Dark Ghetto, the angry essays of Baldwin, and the abrasive Autobiography of Malcolm X.
"What was I to do? As an American writer, still oriented toward social fiction, I felt an itch, an irresistible urge to know. I held to the old-fashioned notion that an author has a special obligation
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