Photo Credit: Troy Johnson
John Edgar Wideman was born in Washington, DC., in 1941. Shortly before his first birthday, his family moved to Homewood, an African-American community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which has been the locale of much of his fiction. He attended Peabody High, one of Pittsburgh's best secondary schools, where he excelled in his studies as well as in sports.
He was awarded a Benjamin Franklin scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania, where he not only won a creative writing prize but also earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Matching his scholastic achievements with his athletic ones, he won All-Ivy League status as a forward on the basketball team and successfully competed on the track team. In 1963, he graduated with a B.A. in English, and won a Rhodes scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford University's New College.
Returning to the United States in 1966, Wideman spent a year as a Kent Fellow at the University of lowa's Writers' Workshop, where he completed his first novel, A Glance Away, published in 1967. His other novels include Two Cities, Hurry Home, The Lynchers, Hiding Place, Sent for You Yesterday, Philadelphia Fire, and The Cattle Killing. He is the author of a memoir, Brothers and Keepers. His short story collections are Damballah, Fever, The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, and All Stories Are True. Houghton Mifflin will reissue the short story collection Damballah and the novel Hiding Place in September 1998 in the Mariner trade paperback series. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman -- 19 interviews spanning 3 decades-has recently been published by the University Press of Mississippi.
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Wideman is the only writer to have been awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice-- once in 1984 for his novel Sent for You Yesterday and again in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. In 1998, Wideman won the Rea Award for the short story, an award judged this year by Grace Paley, Tim O'Brien, and Gina Berriault (previous winners include John Cheever and Eudora Wefty). In 1990, he also received the American Book Award for Fiction. He was awarded the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction in 1991 and the MacArthur Award in 1993. Other honors include the St. Botolph Literary Award (1993), the DuSable Museum Prize for Nonfiction for Brothers and Keepers (1985), the Longwood College Medal for Literary Excellence, and the National Magazine Editors' Prize for Short Fiction (1987). In 1996, he edited the annual anthology The BestAmerican Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin). He is currently at work on a collection of essays about race and basketball.
Wideman is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His articles on Malcolm X, Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, Michael Jordan, Emmett Till, Thelonius Monk, and women's professional basketball have appeared in The New Yorker, Vogue, Esquire, Emerge, and the New York Tlmes Magazine. His son Dan is a published writer. His daughter, Jamila, is a professional basketball player for the L.A. Sparks. Wideman lives in Amherst with his wife, Judy, a lawyer specializing in death penalty cases.
Did you know?
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John Edgar Wideman was the Second African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship? |
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Widemans' Cousin, Albert French, wrote a wonderful book; Billy |
Briefs,
Stories for the Palm of the Mind
Briefs is available exclusively from Lulu
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Publisher Lulu Press, Inc.
Publication Date March 14, 2010
Hardcover, 168 pages
Calvin Reid, in a Publishers Weekly article dated 3/5/2010, reports: Wideman described Briefs, Stories for the Palm, as a collection of "microstories" and said the book examines the nature of storytelling by using fictional voices that are eavesdroppers and diarists.
Hurry
Home
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Publisher Lulu Press, Inc.
Publication Date February 22, 2010
Hardcover, 175 pages
Orginally published: Harcourt (New York, NY), 1970
In 1970, The New York Times wrote,"Hurry Home is a dazzling display...we have nothing but admiration for Mr. Wideman's talent. Wideman's second novel is the powerful and remarkably prescient story of a highly educated, multiracial man's struggle to find himself and understand his place in a country walled off by sharp racial and class divisions which seem to preempt the very possibility of his existence." Cecil Braithwaite works as a janitor while earning a law degree, yet discovers faithful adherence to the script promising the American Dream is not enough. He travels abroad, looking to Europe and Africa, but can't escape the abiding sense of rootlessness, of being trapped in a halfway house of questions the world's not yet ready or willing to answer. Wideman starkly portrays how difficult it is to shake free of the shackles one is born to, claim an identity that transgresses society's most fundamental boundaries, and find one's true Home.
The
Lynchers
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Publisher Lulu Press, Inc.
Publication Date February 22, 2010
harcover, 268 pages
Interior Color Black And White
Orginally published: Harcourt (New York, NY), 1973
Almost 30 years before 9/11, John Edgar Wideman published his third novel, a revolutionary and controversial story about four African-American men who hatch a terrorist plot to shake a complacent America to its foundations. They see their plan to lynch a white cop as the ultimate symbolic act of protest in a racist, hypocritical society mired in fundamental inequalities that contradict its Home of the Free credo. Critic Saunders Redding raved, It is all here...the history of Negro America raised to the grandeur of superb fiction, as Tolstoy did it for the history of the Russian people in the Napoleonic era in War and Peace. I think The Lynchers is far and away the truest, the most moving, and the most brilliantly crafted novel of Negro life in almost a quarter of a century--that is, since Ellison's Invisible Man, which in some ways it surpasses.
A
Glance Away
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Publisher Lulu Press, Inc.
Language English
Hardcover, 184 pages
Orginally published: Harcourt (New York, NY), 1967
John Edgar Wideman's first novel, A Glance Away, was published in 1967 when the author was just 26 years old. The New York Times Book Review raved "Here is a novelist of high seriousness and depth. He has all sorts of literary gifts, including a poet's flair for a taut, meaningful, emotional language." The action unfolds over the course of a single day, but deftly jumps through time to interweave the life journeys of two very different men whose paths converge one unforgettable evening with surprising and unforgettable results. Eddie Lawson, a young African-American, has spent a year kicking his drug habit and finally returned home. Robert Thurley, a white college professor, is on the verge of crumbling under the weight of haunting family memories, alcoholism, and a tormented struggle with his ambiguous sexual identity. Their encounter forcefully illustrates the consequences of our failure to understand one another, and the transformative possibilities that open up for those brave enough to try.
Fanon
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; 10 edition (February 7, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0618942637
ISBN-13: 978-0618942633
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
Widemans first novel in a decade conjures the author of The Wretched of the Earth and his urgent relevance today Widemans fascinating new novel weaves together fiction, biography, and memoir to evoke the life and message of Frantz Fanon, the influential author of The Wretched of the Earth. A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1927, Fanon fought to defend France during World War II and then later against France in Algerias war for independence. The Wretched of the Earth, written in 1961, inspired leaders of liberation movements from Steve Biko in South Africa to Che Guevera to the Black Panthers in the United States. Widemans novel is disguised as the project of a contemporary African-American novelist, Thomas, who undertakes writing a life of Fanon. The result is an electrifying mix of perspectives, traveling from Manhattan to Paris to Algeria to Pittsburgh. Part whodunit, part screenplay, and part love story, Fanon introduces the French film director Jean-Luc Godard to ailing Mrs. Wideman in Homewood, and chases the meaning of Fanons legacy through our violent, post-9/11 world, which seems determined to perpetuate the evils Fanon sought to rectify.
God's Gym: Stories
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Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Mariner Books (August 10, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0618711996
ISBN-13: 978-0618711994
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.6 inches
From one of the most renowned authors of our time comes the eagerly anticipated God's Gym, John Edgar Wideman's first story collection in more than a decade. In these stories, Wideman offers an unadulterated view of contemporary life, exploring gender, race, family, and relationships.
Critical Essays on John Edgar
Wideman
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TuSmith, Bonnie, and Keith E. Byerman, eds.
ISBN: 157233469X
Pub. Date: April 2006
Format: Hardcover, 312pp
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
John Edgar Wideman is one of the most prominent African American writers today.
He is the first author to have been awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
twice-once in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and again in 1990 for Philadelphia
Fire. His memoir, Fatheralong, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Yet,
despite all of Wideman's accolades and renown, there are only three full-length
studies on his work to date.
TuSmith's and Byerman's Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman takes a bold step
in expanding Wideman scholarship. This volume is an indispensable study of
Wideman's oeuvre, covering the full range of his career by addressing the key
features of his fiction and nonfiction from 1967 to the present.
The essays in this book reflect the most advanced thinking on Wideman's
prolific, extraordinary art. The collection features at least one article on
each major work and includes the voices of both well-established and emerging
scholars. Though their critical perspectives are diverse, the contributors place
Wideman squarely at the center of contemporary African American literature as an
exemplar of postmodern approaches to literary art. Several position Wideman
within the context of his predecessors-Wright, Baldwin, Ellison-and within a
larger cultural context of music and collective history. The essays examine
Wideman's complex style and his blending of African and Western cosmologies and
aesthetics, the use of personal narrative, and his imaginative revisioning of
forgotten historical events. These insightful analyses cover virtually every
stage of Wideman's career and every genre in which he has written. A detailed
bibliography of Wideman's work is also included.
Informed yet accessible, this collection will be a rich source of information
and intellectual stimulus for teachers, students, and scholars in American and
African American literature, as well as general readers interested in Wideman's
multilayered and challenging texts.
Bonnie TuSmith is the author or editor of several books, including Conversations
with John Edgar Wideman. Past president of MELUS, the Society for the Study of
Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, she is an associate professor of
English at Northeastern University.
Keith E. Byerman serves on the editorial board of African American Review and is
president of the John Edgar Wideman Society. He is the author of several books,
including The Short Fiction of John Edgar Wideman. He is a professor of English
at Indiana State University.
Ready for Revolution: The Life
and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)
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ISBN: 0684850044
Pub. Date: February 2005
Format: Paperback, 848pp
Publisher: Scribner
By any measure, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) fundamentally altered the course of history. Published at the fifth anniversary of Carmichael's death, this long-awaited autobiography fills a yawning gap in the American historical record as it chronicles the legendary civil rights leader's work as chairman of SNCC, patriarch of Black Power, Pan-African activist, and social revolutionary. It is an unflinching, searing, often visionary testament to the man's legacy and joins the works of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela as a crucial and colorful contribution to contemporary history.
As in life, the Carmichael in
these pages is the definition of charisma and determination. In sharp prose full
of Carmichael's candor, wit, irrepressible sense of irony, and undying love for
his people, Ready for Revolution relates with clear-eyed intelligence the epic
struggle for human liberation in our time. Carmichael -- who in 1978 changed his
name to Kwame Ture in honor of his mentors, the revolutionary African leaders
Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure -- recounts the course of his own experience and
struggles, ranging from the prison farms and lynch mobs of Mississippi through
the firefights and political intrigue of the African liberation wars to Black
Power and Pan-Africanism. His transformation from immigrant child to impassioned
activist is spellbinding. Populated with an international cast of luminaries,
including James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Miriam Makeba, Shirley Graham Du
Bois, Toni Morrison, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel
Castro, Ready for Revolution captures, as few books ever have, the pulse of the
cultural upheavals that define the modern world.
More than the sum of its parts, this book is the personal testimony of a
supremely courageous and committed African-American freedom fighter, radical
thinker, and warm and engaging human being. Regardless of whether one subscribes
to Carmichael's politics and ideas, there is no denying the overwhelming
influence he had on American lives and history. And his view from the eye of the
black-struggle storm is invaluable.
Philadelphia Fire: A Novel
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ISBN: 061850964X
Pub. Date: January 2005
Format: Paperback, 208pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
From "one of America's premier writers of fiction" (New York Times) comes this novel inspired by the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the back-to-nature, Afrocentric cult known as Move. The bombing killed eleven people and started a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the center of the story is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and his search for the lone survivor of the fire ' a young boy who was seen running from the flames. An impassioned, brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America, "Philadelphia Fire isn't a book you read so much as one you breathe"
Brothers and Keepers: A
Memoir
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ISBN: 0618509631
Pub. Date: January 2005
Format: Paperback, 272pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
A haunting portrait of lives arriving at
different destinies, Brothers and Keepers is John Edgar Wideman's seminal memoir
about two brothers ' one an award-winning novelist, the other a fugitive wanted
for robbery and murder. Wideman recalls the capture of his younger brother
Robby, details the subsequent trials that resulted in a sentence of life in
prison, and provides vivid views of the American prison system.A gripping,
unsettling account, Brothers and Keepers weighs the bonds of blood, tenderness,
and guilt that connect Wideman to his brother and measures the distance that
lies between them.
Author Description
John Edgar Wideman won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday
and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. His second memoir, Fatheralong, was a
finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent books are Hoop Roots and
The Island: Martinique. He teaches at Brown University.
Sent for You Yesterday
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ISBN: 0395877296
Pub. Date: April 1998
Format: Paperback, 208pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
A stunning novel. "Mr. Wideman returns
to the ghetto where he was raised and transforms it into a magical
location."--New York Times Review of Books
Reimagining the black neighborhood of his youth Homewood, Pittsburgh -Wideman
creates a dazzling and evocative milieu. From the wild and uninhibited 1920s to
the narcotized 1970s, "he establishes aamythological and symbolic link between
character and landscape, language and plot, that in the hands of a less
visionary writer might be little more than stale sociology" (New York Times Book
Review).
Hoop Roots:
Basketball, Race, and Love
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ISBN: 0618257756
Pub. Date: February 2003
Format: Paperback, 256pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
While presenting a memoir of discovering basketball, novelist Wideman (U. of Massachusetts-Amherst) reveals much about the origins of black basketball in the US.
A multilayered memoir of basketball, family, home, love, and race, John Edgar Wideman's Hoop Roots brings "a touch of Proust to the blacktop" (Time) as it tells of the author's love for a game he can no longer play. Beginning with the scruffy backlot playground he discovered in Pittsburgh some fifty years ago, Wideman works magical riffs that connect black music, language, culture, and sport. His voice modulates from nostalgic to outraged, from scholarly to streetwise, in describing the game that has sustained his passion throughout his life.
My Soul Has Grown Deep: Classics of Early
African-American Literature
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ISBN: 0345455665
Pub. Date: October 2002
Format: Paperback, 1280pp
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
From New York Times bestselling author John Edgar Wideman, this powerful
collection of African-American literature through the centuries focuses on
classic works by notable authors from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. DuBois. The
poetry of 18th-century writers Phillis Wheatly and The Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave join a chorus of eloquent voices
chronicling the black experience in America in this wonderful celebration of
literary heritage.
My Soul Has Grown Deep includes such landmark works as A Red Record
by Ida B. Wells, a Harlem Renaissance writer; Lyrics of a Lowly Life by
the prolific playwright, poet, and novelist Paul Lawrence Dunbar; Up from
Slavery by Booker T. Washington; and The Autobiography of Jack Johnson:
In the Ring and Out by the heavyweight boxing champion. Each writer is
introduced in an informative biographical essay by Wideman.
The Cattle Killing
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ISBN: 0395877504
Pub. Date: September 1997
Format: Paperback, 224pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
"Fiercely beautifully and deeply affecting."
'Vanity Fair
In plague-ridden eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a young itinerant black preacher searches for a mysterious, endangered African woman. His struggle to find her and save them both plummets them both into the nightmare of a society violently splitting itself into white and black. Spiraling outward from the core image of a cattle killing--the Xhosa people's ritual destruction of their herd in a vain attempt to resist European domination--the novel expands its narrator's search for meaning and love into the America, Europe and South Africa of yesterday and today.
Two Cities: A Love Story
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ISBN: 0618001859
Pub. Date: September 1999
Format: Paperback, 256pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
...[G]oes beyond the conventions of a simple love story....one after another...passages open uschange usand then move on....Two Cities...[captures] images of...everyday surroundings to reveal the crimes and passions of our world. 'Walter Mosley, The New York Times Book Review
This redemptive, healing love story brings to "masterful" (Philadelphia Inquirer) culmination the themes Wideman has developed in fourteen previous acclaimed books. "A harmonic blending of high and low, of the music of the streets and the music of the spheres" (New York Times), Two Cities celebrates the survival of an endangered black urban community and the ways people redeem themselves in a society that is failing them.
Fatheralong: A Meditation on
Fathers and Sons, Race and Society
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ISBN: 0679737510
Pub. Date: August 1995
Format: Paperback, 197pp
Publisher: Random House, Incorporated
With resonant artistry and unflagging
directness, Wideman examines the tragedy of race and the gulf it cleaves between
black fathers and black sons. He does so chiefly through the lens of his own
relations with his remote father, producing a memoir that belongs alongside the
classics of Richard Wright and Malcolm X.
In the tradition of his best-selling Brothers and Keepers, which was about
himself and his imprisoned brother, John Edgar Wideman ("our most powerful and
accomplished artist of the urban black world" - Los Angeles Times Book Review)
gives a searingly honest meditation on "fathers, color, roots, time, and
language." Certain to galvanize national attention, Fatheralong is a fiercely
lyrical and revealing memoir that attempts all the while, "among other things,
to break out, displace, replace the paradigm of race [America's enduring
malaise]." As Wideman puts it: "Teach me who I might be, who you might be -
without it." From affluent Amherst to blue-collar Pittsburgh to rural South
Carolina, here is the story of an American family. Wresting himself free from
the shackles of racial ideology, Wideman bravely engages not only the living but
also the "ghostlier demarcations" of his family's past, the better to understand
who he is today and to heal familial wounds. Fatheralong is a triumphant book of
reckoning, an inspiring celebration of homecoming.
Damballah (Homewood Trilogy)
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ISBN: 0395897971
Pub. Date: July 1998
Format: Paperback, 208pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
John Edgar Wideman grew up in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, a setting he has used for a number of his award-winning novels and stories. Damballah, Wideman's collection of stories about the fictionalized black community of Homewood, is the first in a trilogy consisting of Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday. Somewhat autobiographical, the books are linked by shared characters, events, and locales, like much of Wideman's writing, the stories in Damballah are intense and lyrical examinations of the intense psychological experience of black people in urban America. 'Sacred Fire
This collection of interrelated stories spans the history of Homewood, a Pittsburgh community founded by a runaway slave. With stunning lyricism, Wideman sings of "dead children in garbage cans, of gospel and basketball, of lost gods and dead fathers" (John Leonard). It is a celebration of people who, in the face of crisis, uphold one another--with grace, courage, and dignity.
Hiding Place (Homewood Trilogy)
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ISBN: 039589798X
Pub. Date: July 1998
Format: Paperback, 160pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
A fierce yet loving vision of two characters who are "hiding out" from the failures and fears of their lives. Part of the Homewood trilogy.
A man lay dead in a parking lot. Tommy didn't kill him, but the police will shoot first and ask questions later. Mother Bess is kin, but she is a crazy, mean old lady hiding out high about the Homewood streets--streets that have taken away everything she ever loved. Together, Tommy and Mother Bess are hiding, in anger and fear. Will they find the courage to come out of hiding?
