Author
John Edgar Wideman
Birth Date
June 14, 1941
(85 Years)
Associated Country
United States
John Edgar Wideman (born June 14, 1941) is an American novelist, essayist, and memoirist whose work is known for its experimental style and deep engagement with themes of race, history, family, and incarceration. He was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which becomes a central setting in many of his works.
Wideman studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he excelled academically and was also a standout basketball player. He later became a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, making him one of the first African Americans to receive that honor. Over the course of his career, he has taught at several universities, including the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Pennsylvania.
He is best known for works such as Damballah, Sent for You Yesterday, Philadelphia Fire, and The Cattle Killing, many of which are set in or connected to the fictionalized world of Homewood. Wideman has received major literary honors, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice, and is widely regarded as one of the most formally innovative voices in contemporary American literature.
Wideman studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he excelled academically and was also a standout basketball player. He later became a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, making him one of the first African Americans to receive that honor. Over the course of his career, he has taught at several universities, including the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Pennsylvania.
He is best known for works such as Damballah, Sent for You Yesterday, Philadelphia Fire, and The Cattle Killing, many of which are set in or connected to the fictionalized world of Homewood. Wideman has received major literary honors, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice, and is widely regarded as one of the most formally innovative voices in contemporary American literature.
Books
Languages of Home 2025
John Edgar Wideman, acclaimed since the early 1970s for his award-winning fiction and memoirs, has long been engaged in a project to redefine, from the perspective of an American of color, the...
Slaveroad 2024
John Edgar Wideman’s Slaveroad is a groundbreaking work of “bruising candor and obsessive originality” (The Wall Street Journal). For centuries, the buying and selling of human beings was legal, and...
In Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone, his sixth collection of stories, John Edgar Wideman imbues with energy and life the concerns that have consistently infused his fiction and nonfiction. How does it...
You Made Me Love You 2021
Wideman’s stories are grounded in the streets and the people of Homewood, the Pittsburgh neighborhood of his childhood, but they range far beyond there, to the small western towns of Wyoming and...
American Histories 2018
“JB & FD” reimagines conversations between John Brown, the antislavery crusader who famously raided Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and orator, conversations...
Emmett Till took a train from his home in Chicago to visit family in Money, Mississippi; a few weeks later he returned home dead. Murdered because he was a colored boy and had, allegedly, whistled at...
Fanon 2010
A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Frantz Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought in defense of France...
Black Boy 2007
Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright’s journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man’s coming...
God's Gym 2006
In God's Gym, the celebrated author John Edgar Wideman offers stories that pulse with emotional electricity. The ten pieces here explore strength, both physical and spiritual. The collection opens...
Philadelphia Fire 2005
From “one of America’s premier writers of fiction” (New York Times) comes this novel inspired by the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the back-to-nature, Afrocentric cult...
Brothers and Keepers 2005
A haunting portrait of lives arriving at different destinies, Brothers and Keepers is John Edgar Wideman’s seminal memoir about two brothers — one an award-winning novelist, the other a fugitive...
Hoop Roots 2003
A multilayered memoir of basketball, family, home, love, and race, John Edgar Wideman’s Hoop Roots brings "a touch of Proust to the blacktop" (Time) as it tells of the author's love for a game he can...
Two Cities 1999
A redemptive, healing novel, Two Cities brings to brilliant culmination the themes John Edgar Wideman has developed in fourteen previous acclaimed books. It is a story of bridges -- bridges spanning...
Damballah 1998
This collection of interrelated stories spans the history of Homewood, a Pittsburgh community founded by a runaway slave. With stunning lyricism, Wideman sings of "dead children in garbage cans, of...
Set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Sent for You Yesterday weaves together the lives of a close-knit community through memory, storytelling, and shifting perspectives. At its center is Doot, a...
Fatheralong 1995
With resonant artistry and unflagging directness, Wideman examines the tragedy of race and the gulf it cleaves between black fathers and black sons. He does so chiefly through the lens of his own...
Fever 1990
By turns subtle and intense, disturbing and elusive, the stories in this collection are ultimately connected by themes of memory and loss, reality and fabrication, and by a richless of language that...