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As the author of more than twenty published books, John Edgar Wideman has made an invaluable contribution to American literature. His key works of fiction and nonfiction often explore race and the African American experience, specifically focusing on history, memory, and the African American family. Wideman is the only author to have won two PEN/Faulkner Awards, and his other accomplishments include numerous honorary doctorate degrees, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and an American Book Award.
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Jetzt kostenlos anmeldenAs the author of more than twenty published books, John Edgar Wideman has made an invaluable contribution to American literature. His key works of fiction and nonfiction often explore race and the African American experience, specifically focusing on history, memory, and the African American family. Wideman is the only author to have won two PEN/Faulkner Awards, and his other accomplishments include numerous honorary doctorate degrees, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and an American Book Award.
John Edgar Wideman was born in Washington, DC, on June 14, 1941. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they lived in the middle-class Black neighborhood of Homewood.
John Edgar Wideman traced his family back several generations to before the American Civil War. According to family history, his great-great-great-grandmother was an enslaved woman named Sybela who had two children with her enslaver’s son. The couple then moved from Maryland to Pittsburgh, where they made a home in what would become the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood. Wideman would go on to spend a good part of his childhood in Homewood, and the neighborhood would appear in several of his best-known works.
By the time Wideman was twelve, the family had moved to Shadyside, a predominantly white neighborhood, where Wideman attended Peabody High School. As a boy, Wideman excelled in school. He was a star basketball player, appointed class president, and graduated as valedictorian.
In 1959, Wideman received an academic scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania. He continued to play basketball, becoming the captain of his team and leading them to victory in the so-called “Big Five” tournament against other Philadelphia universities. Wideman also continued to excel in academics, winning several university-based awards for his writing.
The crowing achievement of Wideman’s college career came just before he graduated. In 1963, Wideman was named the second African American to become a Rhodes Scholar, winning the prestigious award for postgraduate studies at Oxford University. This award brought Wideman national attention, including a profile in LOOK Magazine that would result in his first book deal.
Fig. 1: Wideman studied 18th-century British literature at Oxford University.In the spring of 1963, Wideman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with his bachelor’s degree in English. That fall, he moved to Oxford to continue his studies. He studied 18th-century British fiction and once again became the captain of the university’s basketball team.
In 1966, Wideman was awarded a BPhil degree from Oxford University, and he returned to the United States, where he studied for a year at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Wideman’s instructors at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop included the American writer Kurt Vonnegut and the Chilean José Donoso.
In the fall of 1967, Wideman began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, where he would offer the university’s first course in African American literature and later help to develop an entire program in African American studies. That same year, Wideman’s first novel, A Glance Away (1967), was published, followed by Hurry Home (1970) and The Lynchers (1973).
During this time, Wideman’s family was also growing. He had married Judith Goldman, a woman he met studying at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1965, and by 1975, the couple had three children.
Just before the birth of his daughter, Wideman accepted a position at the University of Wyoming, and the family moved to Laramie. In November of 1975, Wideman’s younger brother, Robert, participated in an armed robbery that resulted in the death of a man. Robert and his accomplices fled to Wyoming, where he stayed a night with his elder brother before continuing to Colorado. There, he was apprehended, charged with second-degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Robert’s sentence was finally commuted after more than forty years, and he was released from prison in 2019.
This family tragedy deeply affected Wideman and influenced his writing. His next three works, the story collection Damballah (1981) and the novels Hiding Place (1981) and Sent for You Yesterday (1983) were set in his childhood neighborhood of Homewood and alluded to his brother’s imprisonment and other family stories. Sent for You Yesterday was a great success for Wideman, winning him his first PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Wideman also spent hours visiting and interviewing his brother. These interviews resulted in the 1984 memoir Brothers and Keepers, which explored the diverging experiences of Wideman and his brother.
Fig. 2: Wideman's brother and son were both incarcerated for murder.In 1986, Wideman accepted a teaching position at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This same year, his family was struck by another violent tragedy. While on a camping trip, Wideman’s sixteen-year-old son, Jacob, inexplicably stabbed his roommate to death. He was charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
The years following his son’s imprisonment were some of Wideman’s most prolific. Over the next decade, he published three novels, two collections of short stories, and another memoir.
Wideman and his wife divorced in 2000, and in 2004, he accepted a position at Brown University. That same year, Wideman married Catherine Nedonchelle, a French journalist.
In 2014, Wideman became a professor emeritus at Brown University. He continues to write and splits his time between New York City and France.
John Edgar Wideman is known for his work that explores race and the African-American experience. Much of his writing revolves around the idea of family, his family, in particular, and how the legacy of slavery and continued racism and oppression affect the African American family. In an essay published in The New Yorker in 1994, Wideman wrote about his relationship with his incarcerated son and the importance of storytelling in reclaiming family history.
…our name, ‘Wideman,’ carved in stone in the place where the origins of the family name begin to dissolve into the loam of plantations owned by white men, where my grandfathers’ identities dissolve, where they were boys, then men, and the men they were fade into a set of facts, sparse, ambiguous, impersonal, their intimate lives unretrievable, where what is known about a county, a region, a country and its practice of human bondage, its tradition of obscuring, stealing, or distorting black people’s lives, begins to crowd out the possibility of seeing my ancestors as human beings. The powers and principalities that originally restricted our access to the life that free people naturally enjoy still rise like a shadow, a wall between my grandfathers and me, my father and me, between the two of us, father and son, son and father.
So we must speak these stories to one another.” - “Father Stories”
Slavery, Wideman argues, and the consequent erasure of Black history still haunt African American families. Storytelling is a fundamental way of reclaiming this history.
John Edgar Wideman is the author of more than twenty published works, including novels, short story collections, and works of nonfiction.
John Edgar is the author of several short story collections, including Damballah (1981) and The Stories of John Edgar Wideman (1992).
Published in 1981, Damballah is part of the so-called Homewood trilogy. Along with the novels Hiding Place (1981) and Sent for You Yesterday (1983), Damballah is set in Wideman’s childhood neighborhood of Homewood in Pittsburgh. The twelve interconnected stories in the collection tell the history of Homewood as well as the history of Wideman’s family, beginning with his great-great-great-grandmother, an enslaved woman who settled in Homewood in the 1800s.
Wideman has objected to calling Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday a trilogy, saying that he did not write them with the intention of creating a unified collection.
First published in 1992, The Stories of John Edgar Wideman was reissued as All Stories Are True in 1993. The collection includes ten stories, most of which are also set in Homewood. In each piece, Wideman explores various facets of the urban African American experience.
Two of John Edgar Wideman’s best-known novels are Sent for You Yesterday (1984) and Philadelphia Fire (1991).
The novel Sent for You Yesterday is the final installment in Wideman’s Homewood trilogy. It is set in the 1970s and tells the story of Albert Wikes, a young African American man who fled his Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood after killing a white police officer. For seven years, Wikes stays on the run. When he finally returns homes, his friends and neighbors fill him in on what he has missed.
Fig. 3: Sent for You Yesterday is set in Pittsburgh, like much of Wideman's work. These stories make up the nonlinear narrative of Sent for You Yesterday. The novel won Wideman his first PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was included on the American Library Association Notable Book List.
John Edgar Wideman’s 1991 novel Philadelphia Fire was inspired by the 1985 MOVE bombing.
In 1985, the Philadelphia police department bombed a house occupied by MOVE, a revolutionary organization that combined ideas of Black power with a radical commitment to communal living and opposition to modern technology. The organization had occupied a house in a West Philadelphia neighborhood for four years, and neighbors frequently complained about the poor state of the building as well as various unpleasant interactions with the occupants.
Finally, the police obtained arrest warrants for several members of MOVE. Neighbors were evacuated, and five hundred police officers attempted to force the thirteen inhabitants from the house. A standoff and firefight ensued, ending when a Philadelphia police department helicopter dropped two bombs on the house. The bombing killed eleven of the thirteen inhabitants, including five children, and the resulting fire spread to destroy more than sixty of the surrounding houses.
Wideman’s novel tells the story of Cudjoe, a writer searching for a boy who supposedly survived the bombing but was never seen again. Cudjoe’s investigation leads him to uncover old memories as he reacquaints himself with the neighborhood he grew up in and comes to terms with how the city is changing. Philadelphia Fire won the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award, making Wideman the only author to win the prize twice.
Some of John Edgar Wideman’s most celebrated works are his memoirs, including Brothers and Keepers (1984) and Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (1994).
Wideman began working on the memoir Brothers and Keepers after his younger brother Robert was charged with second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Alternating between his voice and that of his brother, Wideman explores their diverging paths, from their childhood together in Pittsburgh to Wideman’s success as an author and academic and his brother’s journey into a life of drugs and crime.
While the memoir is a moving portrait of the two brothers and Wideman’s larger family, it is also an in-depth look at the American criminal justice system and life in an American prison. Brothers and Keepers was a finalist for the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award.
This memoir explores Wideman’s relationship with his estranged father and the question of African American fatherhood more broadly. He details his father’s life and their relationship, using it as a lens to examine the connection between racial oppression and relationships between Black Fathers and Sons.
John Edgar Wideman’s award-winning 1991 novel Philadelphia Fire is one of his best-known works.
What Cudjoe has discovered is that the boy was last seen naked skin melting, melting they go do-do-do-do-do-do-do like that, skin melting do-do-do-do-do-do like going off—like bullets were faint after each of the do-do-do-do-do fleeing down an alley between burning rows of houses. Only one witness.” -Philadelphia Fire (Part One)
Here, the protagonist, Cudjoe, is interviewing residents of his old Philadelphia neighborhood, trying to discover what happened to a young boy who supposedly survived the 1985 MOVE bombing.
Prison is an experience of death by inches, minutes, hours, days.” -Brothers and Keepers (“Visits”)
This quote, taken from Wideman’s bestselling memoir Brothers and Keepers, describes the experience of his brother, Robert, in prison. Robert is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and Wideman views this as a prolonged death.
John Edgar Wideman is an American author and academic.
John Edgar Wideman is famous for his novels, short stories, and memoirs that explore race, family, and the African American experience.
John Edgar Wideman’s many achievements include two PEN/Faulkner Awards, numerous honorary doctorate degrees, and a MacArthur Genius Grant.
John Edgar Wideman grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and later Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He has published over twenty books, including novels, short stories, and memoirs, and he worked as a professor for nearly fifty years.
John Edgar Wideman grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the middle-class Black neighborhood of Homewood and later in the predominately-white neighborhood of Shadyside, where Wideman attended high school.
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SIGNUP SIGNUPFlashcards in John Edgar Wideman31
Start learningWhich genre best describes Brothers and Keepers?
Memoir
Robby is arrested for his involvement in a ____________.
Murder
After John left Pittsburgh, he started a new life in __________.
Wyoming
John realizes that both he and his brother were chasing their version of ____________.
The American Dream
Brothers and Keepers exposes the brutality of the American __________.
Prison system
The book ends with Robby winning parole.
False
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