John Edgar Wideman's picture

John Edgar Wideman


USA flag (b.1941)

John Edgar Wideman's life is as dramatic as any of his brooding, Faulknerian novels. Born in Pittsburgh to a black working-class family, he became an African-American golden boy - a Rhodes scholar and basketball star, as talented on the court as he was brilliant in the classroom, and the subject of a 1963 Look magazine article titled "The Astonishing John Wideman." As a boy, he planned to leave his background behind for a dazzling future as a novelist, academic and intellectual, but family and politics intervened. Wideman came to see the complex problems of African-American life as inescapable. His brother, Robby, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison (the victim was killed by Robby's partner in a robbery) in 1976. Wideman's struggle to come to terms with his brother's deeds and their consequences became the subject of his memoir, "Brothers and Keepers." Then, in 1986, his own 16-year-old, mixed-race son stabbed and killed a classmate during a field trip. Articles that subsequently appeared in Vanity Fair and Esquire indicated the boy had long been emotionally troubled and characterized Wideman as filled with controlled racial anger.
 

Genres: Literary Fiction
 
New and upcoming books
October 2024

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Slaveroad
 
Series
Homewood
   Sent for You Yesterday (1981)
   Damballah (1984)
   Hiding Place (1984)
   The Homewood Trilogy (2023)
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Novels
   A Glance Away (1967)
   The Lynchers (1986)
   Reuben (1987)
   Philadelphia Fire (1990)
   The Cattle Killing (1996)
   Two Cities (1998)
   Fanon (2008)
   Hurry Home (2010)
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Collections
   Fever (1989)
   The Stories of John Edgar Wideman (1992)
   All Stories Are True (1993)
   God's Gym (2005)
   Briefs (2010)
   American Histories (2018)
   You Made Me Love You (2021)
   Look For Me and I'll Be Gone (2021)
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Anthologies edited
   Ancestral House (1998) (with Charles H Rowell)
   20: The Best of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (2001)
   My Soul Has Grown Deep (2001)
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Series contributed to
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Non fiction show
 
Omnibus editions show
 
John Edgar Wideman recommends
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What We Lose (2017)
Zinzi Clemmons
"An intimate narrative that often makes another life as believable as your own."

Anthologies containing stories by John Edgar Wideman
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The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019 (2019)
(O. Henry Prize Stories)
edited by
Laura Furman

More anthologies 


Awards
PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction Best Book winner (1991) : Philadelphia Fire


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