[1][2][3][4] It was during his employment as a bartender in Greenwich Village that Gordone found the inspiration for his first major work, No Place to Be Somebody, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
[5] Written over the course of seven years, the play explores racial tensions in a Civil Rights-era story about a black bartender who tries to outsmart a white mobster syndicate.
In his final speech, in June 1995, delivered at the Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, Gordone described the play as being "about country folk who had migrated to the big city, seeking the urban myth of success, only to find disappointment, despair, and death."
After an experimental production directed by Gordone, in November 1967, the play was produced in a showcase of three weekends at The Other Stage in Joe Papp's Public Theater in South Manhattan by director Edward Cornell.
The play was then launched on May 4, 1969 by Joseph Papp on a 248-performance run at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theater,[6] followed by an acclaimed limited engagement at Broadway's ANTA Theatre.