This Norton Critical Edition includes: The only student edition of Soyinka's play. - An expansive introduction, headnotes, and explanatory footnotes by Simon Gikandi. - Nine interior images. - Background materials related to traditional Nigerian myth and culture, including two selections new to the Second Edition. - A new section, "The Play on Stage," that considers Soyinka as director as well as the interpretative challenges of producing and performing Death and the King's Horseman. - Seven critical essays--five of them new to the Second Edition--by Henry Louis Gates Jr., David Richards, Wole Ogundele, Eileen Julien, Cheryl Sterling, Eugene McNulty, and Ato Quayson. - A chronology of Soyinka's life and work and a selected bibliography. Wole Soyinka , one of Africa's foremost writers, won the Nobel Prize in 1986 and is the author of Death and the King's Horseman , among other works. Simon Gikandi is the Robert Schirmer Professor of English and Chair at the University of Princeton. His books include Reading the African Novel, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature , and Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism . He is editor of the Ngugi wa Thiong'o volume in the Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature series. He is presently editing The Encyclopedia of African Literature (Routledge).