Edgar wideman biography

Responding self-consciously to contemporary jazz forms, his later work is filled with free-form ad-libbing, discontinuity, and always a rich integration of voices'. Wideman's awards, while numerous, do not demonstrate the vast and expansive effect he has had on writers, and readers, all over the world. The John Edgar Wideman Experience.

Writer John Edgar Wideman 's new collection of short stories " American Histories " explores issues of race through historical figures like abolitionists John Brown and Frederick Douglass up through modern times In many ways, the novel is about writing and history, but it is also the story of lost children: Simba, a survivor of the bombing, and Wideman's son.

The Cattle Killing also revises texts. The novel revisits Wideman's short story, "Fever," about the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in A neo-slave narrative, the novel is set in eighteenth century and contemporary Philadelphia, as well as Africa and England. Episodes in the novel are filtered through the central character, an unnamed African-American preacher who wanders the diseased edgar wideman biography. The preacher tells stories to an ailing woman, who is possibly an African spirit, to soothe her fever and his rage.

The stories are a lifeline to the past and to the African-American community. The "fever" is also the symbolic epidemic of racism that has plagued this country since its inception. Wideman's latest work, Two Citiesconnects its characters through shared suffering. Three characters voice the text: Kassima, Robert, and Mr. Mallory, a photographer.

It is Mallory who links the two cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, together. He uses his "double-exposed" photographs to express the lives of people who the world has silenced. Like all of Wideman's work, the novel embraces the necessity to address the silences of the African-American community, to let all the voices be heard. The repeated image of lost children in each of the novels stands as a warning of a future that could be lost if the past is not remembered.

Conversations with John Edgar Wideman. John Edgar Wideman's short stories display a range of fictional styles and subjects, but many of his best stories center on life in Homewood, a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh where Wideman grew up, and the history that lives just behind its decaying housefronts. Wideman's postmodernist style can often be difficult, and it certainly presents a contrast to the gritty social reality it portrays, but the fictional lives it conveys are as rich and complex as any in contemporary fiction.

In some ways Wideman's stories resemble pieces of a novel, for many of them portray the same setting and characters over several generations. This may explain why Wideman has not been anthologized as often as many of his contemporaries, for to collect a Wideman story is often to pull it from the fertile autobiographical soil in which it has grown.

Of the almost three dozen stories Wideman has written and published in three collections, at least half center on the same locale, from "The Beginning of Homewood," which appeared in Wideman's first collection, Damballahand which concerns "Great-great-great-grandmother Sybela Owens" running north from slavery in Cumberland, Maryland, to Pittsburgh and freedom.

Damballah, in fact, begins with "a begat chart" that traces Wideman's family from Sybela Owens in the s through half a dozen generations to the s and John French's edgars wideman biography, including John and his brother Tommy. This genealogical chart, which is reprinted in The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, the volume that brings together all three earlier collections, can help readers place characters in their respective branches of the family tree.

For someone who focuses so much of his fictional energy on one neighborhood, the scope of Wideman's fictional subjects is great. Fever, for example, contains "Doc's Story," about a legendary blind basketball player, two stories "Valaida" and "Hostages" exploring Jewish-African American relations, "Surfiction," a metafictional story set in Wyoming, and the title story, a "meditation on history" set in a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in and including actual figures like Dr.

Benjamin Rush. Even out of Homewood, however, Wideman's fiction almost always touches on black subjects: slavery, jazz, South Africa. In many ways Wideman's stories may remind readers of the fiction of Toni Morrisonboth in their ability to evoke black history so powerfully and in their musical style—-staccato and rifflike. The best story in Fever, for example, "When It's Time to Go," is a tale of a black piano player that captures twentieth-century black life in all the richness of its history and its language.

As in so many Wideman stories, Kendra Crawley draws strength and sustenance from her family or from her memories of them. Many of Wideman's stories thus have three fictional coordinates: a distinctly autobiographical foundation, deeper relations to African American life and folklife, and a communicative function as "letters" to family, friends, and, finally, readers.

Wideman's best stories may, in fact, be his earliest, those collected in Damballah and nearly all set in Homewood. In "Daddy Garbage," for example, Lemuel Strayhorn, a local push-cart peddler, finds a dead baby in a Homewood alley and enlists John French to help him bury it one freezing winter night. In all three the past makes the present into a labyrinth of deeper meanings.

Edgar wideman biography: John Edgar Wideman (born June

Read chronologically, the stories of John Edgar Wideman show a writer experimenting with different styles and subjects but always returning to the place he knows and the family he loves. In fact, he sometimes repeats the same incidents in different stories. For example, the story of John French's death, wedged between the toilet and the tub "when his heart stopped," is told in "The Chinaman" and again in "Back Seat" several years later.

Reading Wideman, in other words, is sometimes like reading a novel that can be picked up and set down over several months. Individual incidents may be forgotten, but the feelings for the characters and their geography remain with the reader. Wideman is not always an easy writer. In any one story he may mix several points of view or several different narrative voices.

Like Morrison and William Faulkner before her, the focus is on interior life, on the thoughts and feelings of characters struggling just to get through life. Action and incident are almost incidental to the interior experiences of the characters caught up in them. Similarly, there are often jumps between incidents and ideas that are not easy to follow, a narrative mix that readers may find difficult.

Edgar wideman biography: John Edgar Wideman is an American

Wideman's stories are never linear or stationary. The present is embedded in the past, and generations overlap and interact. Like the jazz that Wideman so often writes of, his prose seems improvisational, and yet it can become a rich blend of stream of consciousness and of street language. As James W. Coleman has written, Wideman "maintains a tension between writing as a self-reflexive art and writing as a social and political enterprise.

However difficult he may be, "his writing never succumbs to postmodernist disruption and dislocation; it always struggles for meaning and tries to make a difference in the world. Born in Washington, D. In he received a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvaniawhere he proved himself equally outstanding in his undergraduate studies and on the basketball court.

Upon graduation, Wideman became only the second African American to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship Alain Locke had received one almost fifty-five years earlieran honor that allowed him to study for three years at Oxford University in England, where he earned a degree in eighteenth-century literature. After returning to the United States in and attending the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Iowa as a Kent Fellow, Wideman returned to the University of Pennsylvaniawhere he served as an instructor and later, professor of English.

Inat the age of twenty-six, he published his first novel, A Glance Away. The novel was well-received by critics, and two years after its appearance Wideman published Hurry Homea novel that chronicled its protagonist's struggle to reconcile the past and the present. After publishing a third novel ina dense and technically complex work titled The LynchersWideman found his name increasingly associated with a diverse set of literary forebears including James JoyceWilliam Faulknerand Ralph Ellison.

During this period Wideman served as the edgar wideman biography basketball coach — at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as director of the Afro-American Studies Program — In he left Philadelphia to teach at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Six years later he ended a long literary silence with the publication of two books: a collection of stories, Damballahand Hiding Placea novel.

Both books focus on Wideman's Home-wood neighborhood. And with the publication in of the third book in the trilogy, Wideman's reputation as a major literary talent was assured. Sent for You Yesterday won the P. At this point, Wideman was drawn by circumstance rather than choice into the edgar wideman biography of nonfiction after his brother, Robbie, was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to life imprisonment.

At times angry, at others deeply introspective and brooding, Brothers and Keepers relates the paradoxical circumstances of two brothers: one a successful college professor and author, the other a drug addict struggling to establish an identity apart from his famous older brother. Nominated for the National Book Award, the memoir set the stage for what arguably might be called Wideman's "next phase.

Inafter seeing his son, Jake, tried and convicted for the murder of a camping companion, Wideman moved back east to teach at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he was named Distinguished Professor in The following year saw the publication of his less than successful but nonetheless intriguing novel Reuben. Two years later, Wideman published a collection of stories, Feverand followed that in with a novel, Philadelphia Fire.

Both of these works reflect Wide-man's ability to interrogate his own experiences, even as his fiction takes up pertinent social issues. In the short stories and the novel, Wideman weaves fiction into the fabric of historical events the former involves an outbreak of yellow fever in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, and the latter the aftermath of the confrontation with and subsequent bombing by Philadelphia police of the radical group MOVE.

What distinguishes these ten stories is their extraordinary repositioning of the reader's attention, away from the source of the stories and toward the human issues they depict. As he works to make sense of his own assets and losses, one finds in Wideman's fiction a continuing engagement with the complexity of history as layered narrative and an ability to articulate the inner essence of events that often elude us.

Coleman, James W. O'Brien, John. Coleman, James W. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, First full-length study of the fiction; contends that Wideman underwent a career-transforming shift from the modernist sensibility of the first three novels to a more Afro-centered perspective in The Homewood Trilogy. Considers virtually all the book-length fiction and nonfiction.

Eschborn, Ulrich. Mosaic Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Defines the works as studies in survival. Follows the first Coleman book in seeing a clear division between the early works and The Homewood Trilogy. Guzzio, Tracie Church. DOI: Makes use of a number of the essays as well as longer nonfiction and fiction. Hoem, Sheri I.

Argues that Damballah and The Cattle Killing demonstrate their postmodern character in the ways they both pose an ancestral figure as a potential source of African American identity and subvert the idea that such a figure can be anything other than a construction, often textually based. Hume, Kathryn. Examines the layering technique that Wideman develops over the course of his career, from the early novels to Hoop Rootsas his way of adding complexity to the narratives.

These include efforts to re-create sounds and smells as well as to employ aspects of other arts. Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. Miller, D. Retrieved May 31, The New York Times. Retrieved October 17, Quentin Understanding John Edgar Wideman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. ISSN Archived from the original on April 15, Retrieved November 15, The New York Review of Books.

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Retrieved December 11, Wolf commutes sentence for Allegheny County man convicted in murder".

Edgar wideman biography: John Edgar Wideman is an

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