You could tell that he was getting back to work when the drinking stopped and the parties stopped. Sitting in uneasy silence—he hated being alone, but, spiritually, he was always alone—he’d put a pad of lined yellow paper on his clipboard and, in his strong, decorous hand, he’d start jotting down a world that honored his imagination, and his dead.

The dead were always with Owen—Owen Dodson, poet, theatre-maker, and onetime Howard University professor, who was the first person to direct James Baldwin’s first play, “The Amen Corner,” in 1955. (The theatre department at Howard didn’t want to do it because Baldwin’s characters spoke “Black English” at a time when mid-Atlantic was the goal, but Dodson did it anyway.)

That was long before I met Dodson, in the early nineteen-seventies, when I w

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