: John A. Williams
: The Man Who Cried I Am
: Fitzcarraldo Editions
: 9781804270974
: 1
: CHF 8.60
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 528
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames. Among Harry's papers, Max uncovers explosive secret government documents outlining 'King Alfred', a plan to be implemented in the event of widespread racial unrest and aiming 'to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society'. Realizing that Harry has been assassinated, Max must risk everything to get the documents to the one man who can help. Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider's view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement. John A. Williams and his lost classic are overdue for rediscovery.

John Alfred Williams (1925-2015) published over twenty books in his lifetime, fiction and non-fiction, including The Angry Ones (1960), The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), The Most Native of Sons: A Biography of Richard Wright (1970), Captai Blackman (1972), and !Click Song (1982). He was the Paul Robeson Professor of English at Rutgers University and won the American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2011.

FOREWORD


BY ISHMAEL REED

I used to watchThe Today Show before leaving for high school. Dave Garroway was the host, and they had a mascot, a monkey called J. Fred Muggs. White authors appeared on the show regularly. I wrote a letter asking why no Black writers were ever booked. Shortly afterward, John A. Williams and two other Black writers appeared. This was the first I’d heard of these writers.

In 1962 in Buffalo, New York, I was hanging with a group of Black nerds, actors, and artists in the apartment of Phillip Wooby, a former classics professor at Howard University. I noticed an article from theNew York Herald Tribune about how John A. Williams had been awarded the Prix de Rome only to have it rescinded. Williams fictionalizes the rejection in his most outstanding novel,The Man Who Cried I Am. “Dear Mr. Ames: I am writing to inform you that the American Lyceum of Letters has chosen you as the recipient of a Fellowship to the American Lykeion in Athens for the year June 1947–June 1948, subject to the approval of the American Lykeion in Athens.” TheNew York Herald Tribune article mentioned that one other Black writer had previously received the award. Casually Wooby said that it was him. He had received the Prix de Rome in March 1951. When I met John Williams, he was still obsessed over the slight. He blamed the rejection on the influence of Ralph Ellison. When I interviewed Ellison, he denied the charge. Williams and I became friends during my last summer in New York. It was 1969, and I had returned to New York after spending about two years teaching in Seattle and Berkeley. My partner, Carla Blank, and I were then living on one of New York’s historic blocks, whose residents at one time included Leon Trotsky. Our next-door neighbor was a writer who influenced me, W. H. Auden. Among the visitors to our apartment were filmmaker Brian De Palma and artists like Larry Rivers, Peter Bradley, Walter Bowart, Gerald Jackson, Algernon Miller, Joe Overstreet, and writers like Richard Brautigan, Cecil Brown, and Lionel Mitchell.

It became a gathering place for the Black downtown art and whi