Works by
John Edgar Wideman
(Writer)
[1941 - ]

Novels

• A Glance Away (1975)

• Hurry Home (1986)

• The Lynchers (1986)

  • All Stories Are True (1993)
    A Glance Away, Hurry Home, and The Lynchers.  See also Identities.

• Brothers and Keepers (1984)
  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.

• Reuben (1987)

• Philadelphia Fire (1990)
  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" (San Francisco Chronicle).

• Cattle Killing (1996)
  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 (1998)
  A redemptive, healing novel, Two Cities brings to brilliant culmination the themes John Edgar Wideman has developed in fourteen previous acclaimed books. It is a story of bridges -- bridges spanning the rivers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, bridges arching over the rifts that have divided our communities, our country, our hearts. Narrated in the bluesy voices of its three main characters, Two Citiesis a simple love story, but it is also about the survival of an endangered black urban community and the ways that people discover for redeeming themselves in a society that is failing them. With its indelible images of confrontation and outrage, matched in equal measure by lasting impressions of hope, Two Cities is a compassionate, lacerating, and nourishing novel.

Homewood Triology
(See Homewood Trilogy (1985)/The Homewood Books (1992))

1. Damballah (1981)
   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.

2. Hiding Place (1981)
   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?

3. Sent For You Yesterday (1983) -- Winner 1984 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction
   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 a mythological 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).

Collections

• Fever: Twelve Stories (1990)

• The Stories of John Edgar Wideman (1992)

• God's Gym (2005)
  God's Gym is the first story collection in more than a decade from one of our most celebrated American authors. A two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and a finalist for the National Book Award, John Edgar Wideman is a master of the short story. He was awarded the prestigious Rea Award for accomplishment in the short story form, and these electric, mesmerizing stories have appeared in numerous magazines, including Harper's Magazine, GQ, Playboy, Esquire, Callalloo, and Fiction, as well as in The Best American Short Stories. God's Gym features stories that explore issues of strength and faith, fate and belief. In the first story, Wideman writes, "My mother believes in a god whose goodness would not permit him to inflict more troubles than a person can handle. A god of mercy and salvation. A sweaty, bleeding god presiding over a fitness class in which his chosen few punish their muscles. She should wear a T-shirt: God's Gym." Here are stories that chart the thorny relationships between genders, races, and friends, stories that break the rules and expose the turning points of life for what they really are.

Memoirs

• Hoop Roots -- Nonfiction Honor, 2002 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award.
  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 back lot 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.

• The Island: Martinique (2003)
  In this compelling travel memoir, author John Edgar Wideman explores Martinique’s seductive natural beauty and culture, as well as its vexed history of colonial violence and racism. Attempting to decipher the strange, alluring mixture of African and European that is Creole, he and his French traveling companion develop a powerful attraction to one another, which they find at once threatened and elevated by a third party—the island itself.

  Against Martinique’s vivid backdrop of Africans and Creoles, Thomas Jefferson and Paul Gauguin, a live volcano, Zouk music, native psychiatrist-writer Frantz Fanon, and the legacy of slavery and colonialism, Wideman’s story is a rich intersection of place, history, and the intricacies of human relations. Through it he gets deep into the Caribbean and close to the heart of the Creole experience.

Other

• John Edgar Wideman, Interview (1987)
  Audio Cassette

• Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (1995)
  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.

• Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe (1995)

• The Best American Short Stories 1996: Selected from U.S. and Canadian Magazines (1996)

• 20: The Best of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (2001)

• My Soul Has Grown Deep: Classics of Early African-American Literature (2002)
  In this vital and inspiring volume, John Edgar Wideman has brought together the first truly representative sampling of literature by African-American writers in the early centuries of our history. Reaching across periods, styles, and regional borders, Wideman has selected twelve works of genius–some of them celebrated literary icons, others neglected or forgotten masterpieces– and reprinted them in their entirety. The result is a book as thrilling in its passion as it is vast in scope.
  
  Though these selections come from a range of genres (verse, memoir, historical, and personal narrative), they are all, fundamentally, stories of strength and survival. Frederick Douglass’s frank narrative of escape from slavery and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s classic verse take their place beside lesser-known works like Nat Love’s stirring account of life as a black cowboy, Ida B. Wells’s haunting descriptions of lynchings, and the crisp, compelling adventures of Olaudah Equiano. Wideman prefaces each selection with an illuminating biographical essay.
  
  The fruit of a lifetime’s devotion to the best American writing, My Soul Has Grown Deep will stand as an enduring monument to the depth and beauty of African-American literature.

See also:

• Conversations With John Edgar Wideman (1998), Bonnie Tusmith, ed.