Al Young

Young, Al (b. 1939), poet, novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, editor, essayist, musician, and educator. Born Albert James Young in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, on 31 May 1939, Young later moved to Detroit, Michigan, with his parents. He resides in Palo Alto, California. His parents were Albert James, a professional musician and autoworker, and Mary Campbell Young Simmons. Young married Arline Belck, a freelance artist, on 8 October 1963. They have one son, Michael James. After attending the University of Michigan (1957–1961), Young was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University (1966–1967) and received his BA in Spanish from the University of California at Berkeley (1969). While at Berkeley, he worked as a writing instructor and language consultant for Berkeley Neighborhood Youth Corps and then took the position of the Edward H. Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University (1969–1974). He wrote and collaborated on several screenplays including Nigger, Sparkle (1972), and Bustin Loose (1981) for Richard Pryor, and edited and founded several multicultural literary magazines such as Loveletter (1966–1968), Quilt (1981), and, with Ishmael Reed, Yardbird (1972–1976). With Reed, he edited and contributed to Yardbird Lives! (1978) and Calafia: The California Poetry (1979). He began directing the Associated Writing Programs in 1979 and was writer in residence at the University of Washington, Seattle (1981–1982). In addition, he has been a Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Rice University. He is the recipient of the San Francisco Foundations Joseph Henry Jackson Award (1969), National Arts Council awards for editing and poetry (1968–1970), several National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1968, 1969, 1975), the Pushcart Prize (1980), a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1974), the California Association of Teachers of English Special Award (1973), the New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation (1980), and the Before Columbus Foundation Award (1982).

Young's passion for music permeates all of his writing. His belief in music as a central force in human lives appears in his early work Snakes (1970), where the main character MC grows up as he matures in his musical talent. Young's collections of “musical memoirs,” Bodies & Soul (1966), Kinds of Blue (1984), Things Ain't What They Used to Be (1987), and Drowning in the Sea of Love (1995) all demonstrate the affinity between music and everyday life. As he discusses individual musicians, he illustrates how art intensifies human experiences and how music evokes powerful emotions and memories.

His poetry imitates the improvisational style of jazz music, especially in his first collection of poems, Dancing (1969), where Young uses flexible rhythms and juxtaposes long and short lines. His later works, Geography of the Near Past (1966) and The Song Turning Back into Itself (1971), are tighter and more controlled in both rhythm and structure. The poems in Geography narrate specific events such as his wife's pregnancy or a visit to a friend in jail. The rapid, stream-of-consciousness writing and the attention to cultural items show evidence of the Expressionist movement and the Beat poets. Later collections are The Blues Don't Change: New and Selected Poems (1982) and Heaven: Collected Poems 1958–1988 (1989).

Young's novels are realistic and have been compared to those of John Updike because his stories glorify the middle class and focus on the everyday world. He compliments the musician Charles Mingus in the biography Mingus/Mingus (1989; cowritten with Janet Coleman) for his ability to incorporate musical traditions and still deliver the “soul and gut and night-and-dayness of being alive.” Aware of the tendency on the part of black writers to fulfill popular expectations of African Americans in their writings, Young avoids polemical topics in his works. His much admired poem “Dance for Militant Dilettantes” critiques a white readership demanding a particular black “type” and indicting militant black rights advocates.

Young counteracts stereotypical conceptions of African Americans through his depiction of quirky, offbeat personalities. His characters are endearing not because they are marginal but because they portray those eccentricities that make Americans so fascinating. In Snakes, MC's friend Shakes speaks in Shakespearean phrases; the character of Sidney J. Prettymore in Sitting Pretty (1976), an aging philosopher of life, becomes a radio talk-show celebrity; and Mamie Franklin's husband in Seduction by Light (1988) returns to her as a ghost. Young's characters often search for self-definition and an understanding of how their past fits into their present. Angelina in Who is Angelina? (1975) wrestles with this question after a suicide attempt while Durwood Knight, the retired professional basketball player in Ask Me Now (1980), struggles to define his role as father and husband. Young's ear for language and music contributes to the success of his books and makes them especially enjoyable when he reads passages aloud in public. His characters' use of dialects grants them a great range of expression. In their mouths, the vernacular discourse provides a more versatile form of expression, much in the same way jazz music offers the musician a personal voice above and beyond the tradition. Most recently, Young turned to editing literature and published African American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1996).

Bibliography

• Sharon R. Gunton, ed., Contemporary Literary Criticism, 1981.
• Elizabeth Schultz, “Search for ‘Soul Space’: A Study of Al Young's ‘Who is Angelina?’ (1975) and the Dimensions of Freedom”, in The Afro-American Novel Since 1960, eds. Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer, 1982, pp. 263–287.
• Al Young, Larry Kart, and Michael S. Harper, “Jazz and Letters: A Colloquy,” Triquarterly 68 (Winter 1987); 118–158.
• Irv Broughton, ed., The Writer's Mind: Interviews with American Authors, vol. 3, 1990.
• James P. Draper, ed., Black Literature Criticism, vol. 3, 1992.
• Don Lee, “About Al Young,” Ploughshares 19.1 (Spring 1993): 219–224

Miriam M. Chirico