Forrest, Leon (1937–1997), novelist. Leon Forrest was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 8 January 1937. An only child, he grew up in the largely segregated South Side in a family whose heritage was shaped by his mother's New Orleans, Creole, and Catholic origins and his father's Mississippi Protestant roots. This dual religious heritage is an important influence in his fiction. He attended Wendell Phillips School in his neighborhood, then became one of the few black students to attend Hyde Park High School during the years 1951–1955. He attended Wilson Junior College (1955–1956), Roosevelt University (1957–1958), and the University of Chicago (1959–1960), and served in Germany in the U.S. Army. After his term in the service, Forrest returned to Chicago determined to pursue a career as a writer. He resumed taking courses at the University of Chicago and supported himself for a while by working in a bar and liquor store managed by his mother and stepfather—the setting that inspired many of the scenes in Divine Days (1992). In the mid-1960s, while working on his first novel, Forrest became a journalist, working initially for a neighborhood newspaper, the Woodlawn Observer, and later for Muhammed Speaks, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam. He was promoted to associate editor of Muhammed Speaks in 1969 and managing editor in 1972. In 1973, Forrest's first novel, There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, was edited by Toni Morrison and published by Random House with an introduction by Ralph Ellison. Forrest received high praise and was immediately hailed as a major talent. Shortly after the novel's publication, he was appointed to the faculty of Northwestern University, where he was professor and chair of African American Studies.
A highly experimental and symbolically dense novel, There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden introduces the fictional universe of Forest County, a world strikingly similar in its texture to Cook County, Illinois, where Chicago is located. Forrest shares with William Faulkner an intense concern with geographical settings, with history and culture as they unfold through family chronicles, and with the burden of personal and historical consciousness. His novels are linked by their shared location, by interlocking family genealogies, and by their exploration of the experiences and developing consciousness of Nathaniel Witherspoon, who grows to maturity over the course of Forrest's first three novels.
There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden is a highly lyrical novel that explores the multiple layers of Nathaniel Witherspoon's consciousness in the context of his mother's death during the early 1950s. In The Bloodworth Orphans (1977), Forrest creates a crowded canvas of characters, all of whom are connected by their orphanhood and their sometimes destructive quests for father images. In this novel, Nathaniel often functions as an auditor and observer of the nightmarish saga of the black descendants of the southern white Bloodworth family, a collector of the memories, stories, and legends he hears. Similarly, Two Wings to Veil My Face (1984) begins with Nathaniel, now twenty-one, being called to the bedside of his grandmother Sweetie Reed. The stories she tells him—about her life and her slave father's—trigger a multilayered journey through time and space, history and myth. Divine Days, an epic novel of over one thousand pages, signals a shift in direction from Forrest's earlier novels. Set during one specific week in 1966, Divine Days revolves around a turning point in the life of Forrest's protagonist, Joubert Antoine Jones. Like so many of Forrest's characters, Joubert is an orphan; like Leon Forrest, he has returned to Forest County after a stint in the U.S. Army and aspires to be a writer. Like all of Forrest's novels, however, Divine Days gives free rein to his formidable creative gifts. In 1994, Forrest published Relocations of the Spirit: Essays.
If Leon Forrest was concerned with the themes of historical and cultural disruption, with orphanhood as a metaphor for the African American—and human—condition, he was equally concerned with the quest for redemption. Like Ralph Ellison, whom he clearly claimed as an important literary ancestor, Forrest saw African American oral traditions as rich repositories of ritual and value, sources of meaning in the face of suffering and tragedy. Storytelling, music, religion, and a highly developed comic sense are inextricably woven into the fabric of his fiction. A major stylistic innovator, Forrest also claimed his place among other major twentieth-century literary modernists. Although his restless experimentation and complex, allusive style often prove difficult on first reading, his novels possess a complexity and depth that reward the demands he makes upon his readers.
Bibliography
- Keith E. Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain. Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction, 1985, pp. 238–255.
- John G. Cawelti, introduction to The Bloodworth Orphans, 1987.
- John G. Cawelti, “Earthly Thoughts on Divine Days,” Callaloo
16.2 (Spring 1993): 431–447. - Danille Taylor-Guthrie, “Sermons, Testifying, and Prayers: Looking Beneath the Wings in Leon Forrest's Two Wings to Veil My Face,” Callaloo 16.2 (Spring 1993): 419–430.
- Kenneth W. Warren, “Thinking Beyond Catastrophe: Leon Forrest's There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden,” Callaloo
16.2 (Spring 1993): 409–418
James A. Miller
