Charles Henry Fuller, Jr., was born in Philadelphia on March 5, 1939, the son of Charles Henry and Lillian (Anderson) Fuller. The son of a printer, Fuller was educated in Philadelphia, attended Villanova University, then served in the U.S. Army from 1959 to 1962. In 1962, he married Miriam A. Nesbitt, and they had two children, Charles III and David. He resumed his studies at LaSalle in Philadelphia from 1965 to 1967 and went on to become the cofounder and codirector of the Afro-American Arts Theatre in Philadelphia from 1967 to 1971. In 1982, LaSalle awarded him an honorary degree after the stage success of A Soldier’s Play (1981). Honorary degrees than followed in 1983 from Villanova University and in 1965 from Chestnut Hill College as Fuller became one of Philadelphia’s most famous writers. He was appointed professor of African-American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Fuller’s plays began to appear during the late 1960’s. In 1968, his two-act play The Village: A Party was produced in Princeton, New Jersey, in October; in March of 1969 it was produced in New York City as The Perfect Party. In 1972, a collection of six of Fuller’s one-act plays was produced in New York City under the title In My Many Names and Days. Other plays that followed in 1974 included the one-act First Love, the two-act In the Deepest Part of Sleep, and the three-act The Candidate. In 1976, his three-act play The Brownsville Raid was produced in New York City by the Negro Ensemble Company, and in 1978, his two-act musical Sparrow in Flight was produced in New York. Another two-act play, Zooman and the Sign, won an Obie Award.

In 1980, Fuller completed the teleplay for Ernest J. Gaines’s The Sky Is Gray, based on Gaines’s short story about an African American farm boy learning about his place in the world. In 1981, Fuller’s two-act A Soldier’s Play was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company to high critical acclaim and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama. It was later adapted to the screen by Norman Jewison, who invited Fuller to write the screenplay. A Soldier’s Story, the film that resulted in 1984, went on to capture Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor. In 1987, Fuller wrote a screenplay for A Gathering of Old Men, a television adaptation of a Gaines novel.

In 1988, Fuller produced Eliot’s Coming and the first two parts of a play series titled We (titled Sally and Prince). The year 1990 saw the production of part 3 (Jonquil) and part 4 (Burner’s Frolic). Zooman and the Sign appeared as a Showtime television production called Zooman in 1995, as did a segment from The Wall in 1998 and the film Love Songs in 1999.

Fuller has earned a number of grants and awards besides the Obie Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1982. Also in 1982, he won the Audelco Award as best playwright. That same year, A Soldier’s Play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Outer Circle Critics Award, and the Theatre Club Award. The film adaptation, A Soldier’s Story, won the Edgar Allan Poe Mystery Award for 1985. Fuller had grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1976. He was named a Guggenheim Foundation fellow for 1977-1978. He has also been active in the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN), the Writers Guild of America, the Dramatists Guild, and the Dramatist Guild Foundation.