How long does it take to read The Amen Corner?
The Amen Corner by James Baldwin takes about 2 hours 8 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 8 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1968. 116 pages, about 31,900 words.
5 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 3 hours 33 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 8 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 20 minutes |
The page count is the median across 21 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Only a boy preacher who had grown up to become one of America's most eminent writers could have produced a play like The Amen Corner. For to his first work for the theater James Baldwin brought all the fervor and majestic rhetoric of the storefront churches of his childhood along with an unwavering awareness of the price those churches exacted from their worshipers. For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her Harlem congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when Margaret's estranged husband, a scapegrace jazz musician, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path. The Amen Corner is a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons. It is a scalding, uplifting, sorrowful and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater.
Subjects: Drama, African American families, African American churches, Domestic drama
