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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.
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?
Hardcover: 240 pages 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.
Paperback: 192 pages 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.
TuSmith, Bonnie, and Keith E. Byerman, eds.
ISBN: 157233469X
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.
ISBN: 0684850044 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.
ISBN: 061850964X 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"
ISBN: 0618509631
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.
ISBN: 0395877296
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
ISBN: 0618257756 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.
ISBN: 0345455665
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.
ISBN: 0395877504
"Fiercely beautifully and deeply affecting." 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.
ISBN: 0618001859 ...[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.
ISBN: 0679737510
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.
ISBN: 0395897971 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.
ISBN: 039589798X 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?
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