The System of Dante’s Hell (AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series)

"Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age…the special agony of the American Negro."
—New York Times Book Review

With a new introduction by Woodie King Jr.

This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante’s Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, treachery. With a poet’s skill Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul—lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.