Wideman, John Edgar (b. 1941), intellectual, educator, novelist, essayist, biographer, short fiction writer, social critic, and commentator. John Edgar Wideman was born on 14 June 1941 in Washington, D.C., to Edgar and Betty (Lizabeth) French Wideman, but he grew up at the foot of Bruston Hill, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's Homewood community. His maternal great-great-great-grandmother, Sybela Owens, a runaway slave, was among the original founders and settlers of this community. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, which he attended on a Benjamin Franklin Scholarship, he was captain of the university basketball team. Wideman holds the distinction of being the second African American Rhodes scholar. He graduated from Oxford University in 1966. Before doing so, however, he married Judy Ann Goldman of Virginia in 1965. They are the parents of three children.

Wideman began his teaching career in the English department of the University of Pennsylvania, where he also founded and chaired, for one year, its first African American studies program. He continued his career as a teacher at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, where he spent more than a decade. He is a full professor of creative writing and American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

From the outset, Wideman, who spent a year as a Kent Fellow in the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Iowa (1966–1967) and published his first novel at the age of twenty-six, was placed among the most prominent and gifted contemporary African American (male) writers. He has continued to garner lofty accolades, being identified not solely as “our leading black male writer,” and as “our most powerful and accomplished artist,” but also as “one of this country's brightest literary lights.” Critics hurry to compare him to James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and even William Shakespeare. Wideman is a two-time recipient ofthe PEN/ Faulkner Award and a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award; he joined the prestigious group of recipients of the MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1994.

Wideman is the author of eight novels: A Glance Away (1967), Hurry Home (1970), The Lynchers (1973), Hiding Place (1981), Sent for You Yesterday (1983), Reuben (1987), and Philadelphia Fire (1990) three collections of short stories: Damballah (1981), Fever (1989), and All Stories Are True (1992). Brothers and Keepers (1984), written with his brother Robert (Robby) Wideman, is a collection of autobiographical essays; he continues with more personal vignettes in Fatheralong; A Meditation on Fathers and Sons (1994). Wideman contributed an essay to Behind the Razor Wire: Portrait of a Contemporary American Prison System, ed., Michael Jacobson-Hardy, 1999.

Accurately identified as a writer-intellectual by critic James Coleman, Wideman has undergone a tremendous personal, ideological, and artistic transformation in the process of overcoming his feelings of alienation from the black community. When he published his first novel, A Glance Away, at the apex of the civil rights movement, the African American literary communal voices to which he added his were, for the most part, vociferously championing the validation of a black aesthetic through the Black Arts movement. However, Wideman clearly wanted to distance himself from its most ardent proponents, such as LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Larry Neal, and Addison GayleJr., whose cardinal goal was to make African American art the “spiritual sister” of the Black Power concept.

The protagonists of A Glance Away, Eddie Lawson, a black rehabilitated drug addict, and Robert Thurley, a white English professor, are driven to seek wholeness and meaning by their sense that something is absent in their worlds. The clear existentialist thrust and modernist perspective of Wideman's innovative work do not ignore or totally circumvent issues of race, but they subordinate them to the central theme of this novel. Wideman's second and third novels, Hurry Home and The Lynchers, confirmed his willingness to continue to glance away from any mandatory validation and fuller exploration of the unique qualities of the African American experience (particularly language and issues of race), which the prophets of the Black Arts movement saw as the serious and legitimate subject matter for art, although The Lynchers indicated a minor movement in that general direction.

Wideman peopled the fictional worlds of his first three novels with major white and black characters, establishing a more rudimentary hu(e)man and modernist experience as his principal concern. However, despite this more “universal” target, and despite the continued comparison to Eliot and Joyce made by critics, Wideman could not escape the “black writer” label; nor could he escape being placed in the vanguard of contemporary black literary production and contributions.

From 1975 to 1983 Wideman took an eight-year hiatus during which he tried to learn to use a different voice. He explains: “I was ‘woodshedding,’ as the musicians would say—catching up…. I was learning a new language to talk about my experience.” With the publication of his “Homewood Trilogy” (Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday), Wideman emerged from his personal exile to (re)claim with pride his history and heritage as Sybela Owens's great-great-great-grandson. He concluded; “if you've read T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, or William Faulkner… those are not the only ‘keys to the kingdom.’ If you have grown up Black, you also have some ‘keys.’” These “keys,” Wideman seems to contend in Fatheralong, are inextricably intertwined with the “pervasive presence of the paradigm of race.” He explains, “The paradigm of race wasn't an illness plaguing society, it was the engine creating and sustaining a particular way of life.”

Thus the “Homewood Trilogy” and subsequent work represent a major turning point in the personal life and literary career of John Edgar Wideman. With them he intentionally embarks on a journey back to the historical self which in Damballah and Hiding Place is inscribed in the signifiers of his family tree, which he instrumentally positions with “beggat charts” at the beginning of these works. Each reconstructs the family history as well as (re)claims and (re)records the central role played by his maternal great-great-great-grandmother in the founding of yet another colonial city upon a hill, located in the space that to Wideman is more than the steel capital of the world. Wideman provides the genesis of yet another pivotal American tale.

For Wideman, Pittsburgh is a city of beginnings. There the Allegheny River, flowing southward from the northeast, converges with the Monongahela, flowing northward from the southeast, to form the beginning of the Ohio River, the line of demarcation between slavery and freedom. However, in his odyssey with his father to Promised Land, South Carolina, recorded in Fatheralong, Wideman discovers and claims an equally significant beginning. There, in the South, in the shadows of pine forests, meadows, arable fields, and rich pastures, his paternal grandparents embarked on their quest for freedom. Wideman concludes, “The South is a parent, an engenderer, part of the mind I think with, the mind thinking with me.” Paradoxically, Promised Land does not appear on most maps of South Carolina, just as there is no mention of “Africans or slaves or slavery in the closely printed eight page outline of the ‘Chronological History of South Carolina (1662–1825).’”

Wideman's inclusion of Africans is crucial, for saliently appurtenant to his remapping and reclamation is the recognition that neither Homewood nor Promised Land can be the sole genesis of his family. History is bound to cultural memory. Wideman writes in Fatheralong: “In our minds, our memories beats the pulse of history.” Memory and history remain central to the economy of being.

Memory and history bridge the path from America to the African past which Orion, the protagonist of Damballah, refuses to relinquish. An African kidnapped and sold into slavery, Orion is lynched for killing the overseer on his plantation. His decapitated body is later found by a slave man/child, who knows that he must throw the murdered slave's head into theriver to release his spirit, allowing it to return to Africa. Wideman published The Cattle Killing in 1996, and Two Cities in 1997.

Since 1981Wideman has become a “seer/ writer” who uses his mediumistic powers as a vehicle through which African American history and culture are accessed, assessed, recorded, and restored. Through them he attempts to “break out, to knock down the walls” of the imprisoning cage(s) known by African Americans, a direct consequence of what he has come to call the “paradigm of race.” His major protagonists struggle with memory against forgetting and assiduously work to create spaces to redeem and (re)create their past. Specificity is inscribed and particulars (“who we are and what we are about”) are celebrated. Negating the superimposed “American Africanism,” as Toni Morrison calls the construction of African Americans in the literary and historical space assigned them by the Eurocentric mind, Wide-man's characters and protagonists work from within the parameters of their marginalized spaces to create, validate, and celebrate alternative realities, such as the rhythm of their language and improvisation of their jazz, providing meaningful insight into the complexity of the African American experience that makes it a unique and distinctive American experience.

Bibliography

• John O'Brien, ed., Interviews with Black Writer, 1973, pp. 213–223.
• Wilfred D. Samuels, “Going Home: An Interview with John Edgar Wideman,” Callaloo 6.1 (1983): 40–59.
• Wilfred D. Samuels, “John Edgar Wideman,” in DLB, vol. 33, Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, eds. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 1984, pp. 271–278.
• John Bennion, “The Shape of Memory in John Edgar Wideman's Sent for You Yesterday,” Black American Literature Forum 20.1–2 (Spring-Summer 1986): 143–160.
• James W. Coleman, Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman, 1989.
• Ashraf Rushdy, “Fraternal Blues: John Edgar Wideman's Homewood Trilogy;” Contemporary Literature 32 (Fall 1991): 312–345.
• Jan Clausen, “Native Fathers,” The Kenyan Review 14.2 (Spring 1992): 44–55. Doreatha Drum-mond Mbalia, John Edgar Wideman: Reclaiming the African Personality, 1995.
• Madhu Dubey, “Literature and Urban Crisis: John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire,” African American Review 32:4 (Winter 1998): 579–595. Bonnie TuSmith, ed., Conversations with John Edgar Wideman, 1998

Wilfred D. Samuels

writer; educator

Personal Information

Born June 14, 1941, in Washington, DC; son of Edgar and Betty (French) Wideman; married Judith Ann Goldman, 1965; children: Daniel Jerome, Jacob Edgar, Jamila Ann.
Education: University of Pennsylvania, B.A., 1963; New College, Oxford, B. Phil., 1966.

Career

Writer, 1966--; professor of English and creative writing, 1967--. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1966-74, began as instructor, became professor of English, 1974, director of Afro-American studies program, 1972-73; University of Wyoming, Laramie, professor of English, 1974-86; University of Massachusetts at Amherst, professor of English, 1986--. Visiting professor and lecturer at numerous colleges and universities; National Humanities Faculty consultant; member of "Agenda for Black Power" panel sponsored by Knopf Publishing Group, February 1993; guest on Frontline, "L.A. Is Burning," broadcast on PBS-TV, April 1993, examining the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Life's Work

John Edgar Wideman is one of the leading chroniclers of life in urban black America. An author who intertwines ghetto experiences with experimental fiction techniques, personal history with social events, Wideman is the only artist who has won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for literature twice. His provocative works depict the widening chasm between the urban poor and the white power structure in the United States, as well as the deep cultural conflicts engendered in African Americans who succeed in penetrating that power structure. Washington Post Book World reviewer Jonathan Yardley noted that Wideman makes clear in his books that "moving out of the ghetto into the white world is a process that requires excruciating compromises, sacrifices and denials, that leaves the person who makes the journey truly at home in neither the world he has entered nor the world he has left."

Wideman is a prolific writer who has been publishing books since he was twenty-six. His body of work includes novels, short story collections, and nonfiction. Much of his fiction explores events and personalities from the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, the all-black neighborhood where he grew up. His stories reveal several generations of Homewood residents, including those who have left the area in triumph or tragedy. Indeed, suggests Wideman, the "triumph" of leaving home is hollow unless one retains the spirit and the culture of the community left behind. For Wideman, an Oxford-trained scholar, that process of absorbing a community and relating its history artistically has provided grist for complex revelations on family relationships, isolation, and the search for self.

Wideman told the Washington Post: "My novels and the essays attempt to exploit the inherent tension between what is fictional and what is factual, and to illuminate how unsteady and unpredictable the relationship is. I'm trying to remind people of what Ralph Ellison [famed black author best known for his novel Invisible Man ] said about the uncertainties that lie within your certainties." This tension between fiction and fact is a hallmark of Wideman's writing. It has helped him to address his own personal tragedies, including the life-term prison sentences of his son and his brother. In interviews the author says little about his brother, Robby, who is serving time in Pennsylvania as an accessory to murder, or about his son Jacob, convicted in 1988 in the stabbing death of another teenager. The dual tragedies loom large in Wideman's art, however, as he seeks to understand life's bitter twists of fate. "I'm not putting up my life as material to explain anything to anyone," the author told the Washington Post. "I'll put it this way. It's a formulation. My life is a closed book. My fiction is an open book. They may seem like the same book--but I know the difference."

Wideman, the oldest of five children, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1941. When he was not yet a year old, his family moved to Pittsburgh, where his great-great-great grandmother, a fugitive slave, had settled in the mid-nineteenth century. Wideman's father, Edgar, worked hard at several jobs simultaneously but was unable to provide economic security for the growing family. As Chip Brown noted in Esquire magazine, "Edgar earned a living as a paperhanger, a welder, a waiter in the cafeteria at Kauffman's department store; for all his doubling up on jobs, he was never able to break the barriers of class and race and economics, and his ambition to be a dentist fell by the wayside." His own perilous fortunes notwithstanding, Edgar Wideman encouraged his children to pursue excellence in everything they did. John became an honor student and an athlete, with dreams of playing professional basketball.

John Wideman's youth was spent in the Homewood district of Pittsburgh, a neighborhood that included many members of his extended family. From a young age he delivered newspapers on upper class Negley Avenue, a "lily white" region where he felt like an "intruder," according to a Wideman essay in the New York Times Book Review. If he was an intruder, he was determined to make his presence known. During his high school years, his family moved to a suburb called Shadyside so he could attend highly ranked Peabody High School. There he earned top grades and became class president and captain of the basketball team. He graduated first in his class in 1959.

"When my family moved to Shadyside so I could attend 'better' schools and we were one of only three or four black families in the neighborhood, I learned to laugh with the white guys when we hid in a stairwell outside Liberty School gym and passed around a 'nigarette,'" Wideman recalled in the New York Times Book Review. "I hated it when a buddy took a greedy, wet puff, 'nigger-lipping' a butt before he passed it on to me. Speaking out, identifying myself with the group being slurred by these expressions, was impossible. I had neither the words nor the heart. I talked the talk and walked the walk of the rest of my companions."

Wideman continued his conformist ways at the University of Pennsylvania, which he attended on scholarship from 1959 until 1963. One of only six black students at the Ivy League college, he became well-known for his basketball skill and for his exposition talents. Washington Post correspondent Paul Hendrickson pointed out that, as a Penn basketball star, Wideman "made All-Ivy, he made Big Five Basketball Hall of Fame. He was among the last of the great 6-foot-2 forwards, before forwards became 7-footers--a leaper who could mix it up underneath and take rebounds off players three and four inches bigger than he was." Wideman excelled off-court as well, winning the university's creative writing prize and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

During his senior year at Penn, Wideman applied for and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He was the first African American in more than a half-century to earn the important academic award. National recognition came from Look magazine, where a profile of Wideman ran in 1963. A professor quoted in the article warned that Wideman would have to be "careful," that now he was a "symbol." Many times over the ensuing years, John Edgar Wideman would ask himself just what it was he symbolized.

In his 1984 memoir Brothers and Keepers, Wideman wrote of his student days: "Just two choices as far as I could tell: either/or. Rich or poor. White or black. Win or lose. I figured which side I wanted to be on when the Saints came marching in.... To succeed in the white man's world you must become like the man and the man sure didn't claim no bunch of nigger relatives in Pittsburgh." As his family's circumstances forced them back into Homewood, Wideman persevered at Oxford. He studied English literature and philosophy and wrote a thesis on eighteenth-century narrative techniques. In 1966 he returned to America for a year's fellowship study at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the nation's best-known proving ground for would-be novelists. He also married Judith Goldman, a fellow Penn graduate.

While still in his twenties Wideman began publishing fiction. His first novel, A Glance Away, appeared in 1967, followed by Hurry Home in 1970 and The Lynchers in 1973. All three books deal with black protagonists who are confused and controlled by their pasts, and who are, at the very least, highly ambivalent about white society. As early as Hurry Home Wideman began to explore the importance of cultural history to self-awareness and the role that family ties and friendships serve in promoting peace of mind.

Throughout the period when his first three novels appeared, Wideman was teaching literature at the University of Pennsylvania. There he was asked to present a course on black writing, and he delved deeply into black literature for the first time. The experience was enlightening--a catalyst to his own work--and eventually the course became the nucleus of the university's Afro-American studies program, which Wideman chaired in 1972 and 1973. Another catalyst to Wideman's work was the death of his grandmother, back in Homewood, in 1973. After the funeral, Wideman and his family reminisced about the history of the family in Homewood, going back many generations, almost to the founding of the neighborhood. From that conversation and others remembered from his childhood, Wideman fashioned his best-known work to date.

Wideman wrote most of his books and stories about Homewood while living in the prairie town of Laramie, Wyoming. He accepted a teaching position at the university there in late 1974. "It was hard to admit to myself that I'd just begun learning how to write," he commented in the Atlanta Constitution. "I realized that the core of the language and culture that nurtured me had hardly been touched by my writing." A creative explosion occurred while he was in Laramie, and by the mid-1980s Wideman had released Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday, a series of interrelated stories and novels now known as the "Homewood Trilogy." Ranging from the nineteenth century to the present, the Homewood Trilogy explores the various lives of descendants of Sybela Owens, a slave who ran North to Pittsburgh with her white husband.

Enthusiastic reviews followed the publication of each of the Homewood Trilogy installments. "Mr. Wideman has used a narrative laced with myth, superstition and dream sequences to create an elaborate poetic portrait of the lives of ordinary black people," wrote Mel Watkins in the New York Times Book Review. "He has written tales that can stand on their own, but that assume much greater impact collectively. The individual 'parts,' or stories, as disparate as they may initially seem, form a vivid and coherent montage of black life over a period of five generations.... These books once again demonstrate that John Wideman is one of America's premier writers of fiction." In the American Book Review, Wilfred D. Samuels concluded: "By going home to Homewood, Wideman has found a voice for his work and consequently a means of celebrating Afro-American culture and further validating the Afro-American experience in literature."

Sent for You Yesterday, the third part of the Homewood Trilogy, was awarded the PEN/Faulkner fiction prize in 1984. The work is yet another Wideman treatment on the themes of creativity, imagination, and cultural bonds as means to transcend despair and socially-sanctioned economic discrimination.

The novel Hiding Place deals with a young boy on the run from a petty robbery that turned deadly. The situation is very similar to the circumstances surrounding the incarceration of Robby Wideman. Robby, the author's younger brother, was sentenced in 1976 to life in prison for his part in a larceny/murder case. Wideman sought to understand his brother's plight, publishing Brothers and Keepers, in 1984. The book, Wideman's only major nonfiction piece to date, attempts to address the difficult questions of "success" and "failure" on white society's terms as well as the sense of guilt Wideman felt about his brother's fate. Nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, Brothers and Keepers brought Wideman national notoriety. He was profiled on 60 Minutes and became a sought-after essayist and commentator on the particular dilemmas faced by black artists.

Tragedy struck again in 1986. Wideman's second son, Jacob, fatally stabbed a fellow camper during an outing in Arizona. Both boys were sixteen. Facing the death penalty, Jacob Wideman agreed to plead guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. John Wideman has steadfastly refused to comment on the case in interviews. "I don't like to talk about it," he said. "On the advice of lawyers, I don't talk about it. I've had all kinds of unpleasant experiences because, of course, the journalists smell the blood and feel it is their responsibility to go after it.... I don't talk about it." Not surprisingly, however, the theme of an incarcerated or missing son has permeated Wideman's fiction since the tragic events in 1986.

Wideman won his second PEN/Faulkner Award for the controversial novel Philadelphia Fire, an angry extrapolation on the 1985 bombing of a black religious cult's Philadelphia headquarters. The actual bombing, ordered by W. Wilson Goode, then mayor of Philadelphia, killed a dozen people and incinerated several blocks of low-income housing. The incident occurred on Osage Avenue, where Wideman had lived while teaching at Penn. The author told the Washington Post that he wanted to "pry the event loose from that collective amnesia that's settled on it.... I want people to re-imagine it, rethink this goddam fire." Wideman's imaginative re-telling of the fire includes direct references to Jacob in prison and an oblique, unfulfilled search for a child seen running from the blaze. A Washington Post reviewer called the book "199 pages of conflagration, a lyric and confusing and riveting and ragged work of fiction that does and does not concern the 1985 ... disaster, in which a bomb from a state police helicopter was dropped on a back-to-nature cult." In the Bloomsbury Review, Mark Hummel concluded of Philadelphia Fire: "Despite the tough questions and the deep-rooted pain, the novel is about survival. While hope is distant, Wideman asks us to hold on. And while his own words seem--to him--heavy, even cumbersome, all he has left, they bring meaning to events apparently beyond meaning."

Currently a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Wideman at mid-life has wrestled with more dilemmas--artistic, personal, and social--than most people encounter in a lifetime. Hendrickson wrote: "You keep wondering how he can even function in this unspoken, surreal, Kafka walking dream, let alone get the garbage out on Tuesdays and compose beautiful sentences." In fact, Wideman's prolific career has continued in recent years with two new story collections and a number of essays for mainstream periodicals like Esquire. His pieces in the 1990s offer a pessimistic view of race relations and a warning that the widening gap between white society and the minority underclass may result in serious social disruption. In an interview with the Washington Post the author said he hopes to wage "a little war against ... a little war to beat back the direction the culture is going."

Concerning his fiction writing, Wideman concluded in the New York Times Book Review: "When I write I want to show how simple acts, simple words can be transformed to release their spiritual force. This is less a conscious esthetic to be argued or analyzed than a determination to draw from the unique voices of Homewood's people the means for documenting the reality of their attitudes and emotions. I want to trace the comings and goings of my people on the invisible plane of existence where so much of the substance of black life resides."

Awards

Rhodes Scholar, Oxford University, 1963; Kent fellow, University of Iowa, 1966; Young Humanist fellow, 1975; PEN/Faulkner awards for fiction, 1984, for Sent for You Yesterday, and 1991, for Philadelphia Fire; John Dos Passos Prize for Literature from Longwood College, 1986; honorary degree from University of Pennsylvania, 1986.

Works

Writings

• A Glance Away (novel), Harcourt, 1967, reprinted, H. Holt, 1985.
• Hurry Home (novel), Harcourt, 1970, reprinted, H. Holt, 1986.
• The Lynchers (novel), Harcourt, 1973.
• Damballah (short stories), Avon, 1981.
• Hiding Place (novel), Avon, 1981.
• Sent for You Yesterday (novel), Avon, 1983.
• Brothers and Keepers (nonfiction), H. Holt, 1984.
• The Homewood Trilogy (includes Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday ), Avon, 1985.
• Reuben (novel), H. Holt, 1987.
• Fever (short stories), H. Holt, 1989.
• Philadelphia Fire (novel), H. Holt, 1990.
• The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, Pantheon, 1992.
• (With others) Malcolm X: In Our Own Image (essays), edited by Joe Wood, St. Martin's, 1992.

Further Reading

Books

• Bell, Bernard W., The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, University of Massachusetts Press, 1987, pp. 281-338.
• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• O'Brien, John, editor, Interviews with Black Writers, Liveright, 1973, pp. 213-23.

Periodicals

• American Book Review, July-August 1982, pp. 12-13.
• Atlanta Constitution, December 3, 1989, p. L1.
• Atlanta Journal, June 7, 1992, p. N8.
• Bloomsbury Review, March 1991, p. 1.
• Boston Globe, June 14, 1992, p. B40.
• Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1992, p. TEMPO-1.
• Esquire, August 1989, pp. 122-32; September 1992, pp. 149-56.
• Nation, October 4, 1986, pp. 321-22.
• New York Times, July 21, 1992, p. C15.
• New York Times Book Review, April 11, 1982, pp. 6, 21; May 15, 1983, pp. 13, 41; January 13, 1985, p. 1.
• North American Review, June 1988, p. 60-61.
• People, February 11, 1985, p. 121.
• Publishers Weekly, November 17, 1989, pp. 37-38.
• Washington Post, May 12, 1984, p. C1; October 15, 1990, p. B1; May 3, 1991, p. B1; August 9, 1992, p. 15.
• Washington Post Book World, July 3, 1983, pp. 1-2; October 21, 1984; November 15, 1987, p. 7; October 7, 1990, pp. 6, 12.

— Anne Janette Johnson

For more information on John Edgar Wideman, visit Britannica.com.

(b. 1941)

1967	A Glance Away. Wideman's first novel, describing a day in the life of a rehabilitated drug addict who struggles to stay clean, is enthusiastically received. It reveals many of the themes that Wideman would continue to explore in his second novel, Hurry Home (1968), including personal and collective liberty and responsibility, isolation, and the importance of family and community. The novel evokes comparisons with European modernist writers. Wideman, educated at the University of Pennsylvania and at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, was raised in Homewood, the African American section of Pittsburgh and the setting of many of his works.
1973	The Lynchers. Wideman's third novel concerns a black intellectual who responds to the violence of his heritage by plotting a ritualized lynching of a white policeman.
1981	Hiding Place and Damballah. Wideman issues the first two volumes of his Homewood trilogy, set in the black section of Pittsburgh and exploring African American history, a community, and an extended family. The final book in the series, Sent for You Yesterday, would appear in 1983.
1983	Sent for You Yesterday. Wideman's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning autobiographical novel is the third set in Homewood, the Pittsburgh ghetto where he was raised. The first person narrator is, like Wideman, a young black writer who has moved far away, returning to Homewood only for reactions and inspiration. Reviewer Alan Cheuse declares that the book "establishes a mythological link between character and landscape," which shows Wideman at the height of his considerable powers.
1984	Brothers and Keepers. Wideman's first nonfiction work--"a personal essay about my brother and myself"--meditates on the fate of his younger brother, who is serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison.
1990	Philadelphia Fire. Wideman wins the PEN/Faulkner Award and the American Book Award for this novel, which blends fact and fiction. It connects two events: the black mayor Wilson Goode's order for police to bomb the headquarters of a protest group in Philadelphia, killing six adults and five children, and the author's relationship with his son, who received a life sentence for murder. Wideman is praised by reviewer Rosemary L. Bray for taking "his readers on a tour of urban America perched on the precipice of hell, a tour in which even his own personal tragedy is part of the view."
1992	The Stories of John Edgar Wideman. Set in Homewood, a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, the stories in this collection are widely praised for their author's grasp of black vernacular. Wideman's handling of race and the black family has been compared favorably with James Baldwin's best work.
1994	Fatheralong. Wideman provides "a meditation on fathers and sons, race and society." Combining autobiography with social commentary, Wideman's book continues the memoir he had begun with Brothers and Keepers (1984).
1996	The Cattle Killing. Wideman wins the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for this historical novel connecting the plight of African Americans in Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century with the story of the Xhosa tribe of South Africa.
1998	Two Cities. The title refers to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, both fraught with street violence. The characters are worn down by their losses, but at the center is the triumphant figure of Mallory, a black photographer who has recorded his people's suffering over many generations and who shows through his art a way to come to terms with a tragic world.

Quotes:

"One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back."

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