Biography of William Wellington Mackey

William Wellington Mackey is from Louisiana and attended Southern University in Baton Rouge. After graduation in 1958 he taught high school in Miami, Florida. With money earned during summers as a waiter and bellhop in the Catskills, a job Cab Calloway helped him land, he entered the University of Minnesota, where he earned a masters degree. While working as a recreational therapist at the Colorado State Hospital in Pueblo, Mr. Mackey completed his first full-length play, BEHOLD! COMETH THE VANDERKELLANS, begun when he was a graduate student at Minnesota. The play, an attack on the black bourgeoisie done in avant-garde manner, was performed by the Eden Workshop, the Negro theater group in Denver, in 1965. COMETH THE VANDERKELLANS, which is particularly satiric of a Negro college president and his family, has attracted a great deal of attention.