Ronald Fair
Biography of Ronald Fair
Chicago has produced more than a few successful African-American writers, in both the literary and sales sense, including Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Willard Motley, and Sam Greenlee. Inspired greatly by Richard Wright, whose classic texts Native Son and Black Boy helped create a literary path for many Black boys with a pen and a headful of ideas, novelist Ronald L. Fair isn’t as well known as his textual contemporaries, but he was another wonderful writer who emerged from that hard city. Fighting every step of the way as he embarked on the revolutionary road of creating literature on his own terms, he had a bigger mission in mind than just fame and fortune.” Read the full article on the life and work of this trailblazing author written by Michael Gonzales.
Also read, “Remembering Ronald Fair” expatriate”s novels, Hog Butcher and We Can”t Breathe, are more timely than ever written by Cecil Brown.
Ronald Lyman Fair was born October 27, 1932 in Chicago, spent three years as a hospital corpsman in the U.S. Navy, and after his military service attended the Stenotype School of Chicago. For twelve years he worked as a court reporter. His writing appeared in the Chicago Daily Defender and the Chat Noir Review before the appearance of his critically acclaimed first novel, Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable (1965). Fair published a half dozen books in his career, including the novels Hog Butcher (1966) [republished as Cornbread, Earl, and Me], World of Nothing (1970), and We Can’t Breathe (1972) as well as a collection of poetry. Hog Butcher was adapted to the screen as Cornbread, Earl and Me (1975), starring Rosalind Cash and Laurence Fishburne. Increasingly disenchanted with American politics and culture, Fair left the United States for Finland in 1971, where he became a sculptor. He died in 2018.
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