Wole Soyinka, Nigeria's most important writer, always seems to be in some kind of trouble. In the 1960's, he backed the wrong side in his country's civil war and spent more than two years in prison, much of that time in solitary confinement. In the 80's, soon after he became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the American news media attacked him as a crypto-Marxist when he dropped a stage production of Orwell's Animal Farm from a theater festival of which he was in charge. But in the contentious world of Nigerian cultural politics he has more frequently been criticized for not being radical enough, and it is in this context that the often difficult essays gathered in Art, Dialogue, and Outrage are best understood...This second edition of Art, Dialogue, and Outrage adds several new pieces to a volume first published in Nigeria in 1988. The book is invaluable for those already interested in the author's work. It is especially good to find seminal essays like "The Fourth Stage" and "Theater in African Traditional Cultures," both of them crucial for understanding the relations between Yoruba religion and Mr. Soyinka's own dramatic practice... What Art, Dialogue, and Outrage does best is to present the history of Mr. Soyinka's responses to the disputes that have always surrounded his work; responses in which he seems to be not so much on the defensive as launching a series of pre-emptive -- and punitive -- strikes...So the "Outrage" of his title is well chosen. Still, the most important essays here are not the polemical ones but those that speak directly to his career as a playwright.