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Fair, Ronald L. (b. October 27, 1932, Chicago, Illinois) Novelist and poet Ronald L. Fair became one of several African American authors in the late 1960s and early 1970s who wrote largely experimental fiction. For this reason, he is often discussed in the same breath as Clarence Major and Ishmael Reed. His debut novel, Many Thousand Gone (1965), is a speculative and satirical narrative that posits a Southern community that had never freed its slaves, while Hog Butcher (1966; republished as Cornbread, Earl, and Me in 1974) indicts racism in Chicago in ways similar to those found in Richard Wright’s Native Son. In the 1970s, Fair returned to speculative fiction with World of Nothing (1970), which comprises two novellas, Jerome and World of Nothing. In the first, the eponymous protagonist becomes a Christ figure due to his ability to foresee evil events and is later crucified for the danger his talent poses to his mother. The novella World of Nothing features a first-person narrator, his friend Red Top, and a lengthy cast of characters who dance into and out of the narrative in the pattern of a blues or jazz improvisation. Set in Chicago, the narrative’s loose structure allows Fair to illustrate many different themes in order to flesh out Chicago’s diversity. The collection World of Nothing won second prize from the National Institute of Letters in 1971.

Fair’s third novel, We Can’t Breathe (1972), won a Best Book Award from the American Library Association that same year for its depiction of the generation of African Americans who were born in the South and moved to the North during the Great Depression. As with many other novels that re-create the migration of African Americans to Chicago, the novel highlights the racism in that city as a way of showing that racism is not simply a Southern problem; its Northern manifestations are just as insidious. The five featured characters, Ernie, George, Willie, Jake, and Sam, struggle to survive in extreme poverty and a community that is full of every possible vice. When World War II begins, the boys see first- and secondhand how Northern racism operates via the segregated and unequal conditions African Americans face in housing and jobs. The boys are also forced to decide how to survive psychologically, whether through independence and militancy or assimilation.

Scholarship on Fair is relatively limited, due perhaps to the absence of any books of fiction since We Can’t Breathe. Fair also published two books of poetry, Excerpts (1975) and Rufus (1977). The following are the most notable journal articles: George E. Kent, “Struggle for the Image: Selected Books by or About Blacks During 1971,” Phylon 33, no. 4 (fourth quarter, 1972); Elizabeth A. Schultz, “The Insistence Upon Community in the Contemporary Afro-American Novel,” College English 41, no. 2 (October 1979).

Ferrell, Carolyn (b. 1963, Brooklyn, New York) Short-story author Carolyn Ferrell is a graduate (1984) of Sarah Lawrence College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and a Fulbright Scholarship, which she used to study abroad and pursue a musical career as a violinist for four years. Ferrell has published her stories in many different periodicals, including Callaloo, The Literary Review, and Fiction, which led to a number of awards and honors. These include berths in The Best American Short Stories 1994 and Best American Short Stories of the Century for her masterpiece, “Proper Library.” Ferrell also won the 1997 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Ploughshares John C. Zacharis Award for Don’t Erase Me (1997), her first short story collection.

Ferrell’s stories are based largely upon the lives of young people she met during her work with literacy programs in the Bronx and Manhattan. Each story subtly probes the intersecting lives of neighborhood residents of different ages, genders, sexualities, crossroads, and racial or ethnic backgrounds, but particularly African American youths trying to obtain freedom through education in a school system and culture that places immense obstacles in their paths. Their pursuits, however, are never divorced from their other identities and desires, which makes Ferrell’s New York a site of identities and voices whose complexity and nuances seldom find their way into mainstream media.

Files, Lolita (b. circa 1964, Fort Lauderdale, Florida) Author Lolita Files emerged in the late 1990s as one of many younger authors of “Sister Novels.” Her novels Scenes from a Sistah (1997), Getting to the Good Part (1999), and Blind Ambitions (2000) are perhaps perfect examples of the genre, with hip, young black urbanites in a nearly relentless, but consistently humorous cycle of partying, loving, and career-climbing. Scenes from a Sistah revolves around the exploits of Armistice “Misty” Fine and her best friend, Reesy Snowden, as they grow up in and travel between Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, Atlanta, and New York City; Getting to the Good Part is a sequel to the first novel. Blind Ambitions introduces three new characters, women who struggle to make a living in the fast-paced, corrupt bacchanalia of Hollywood, all the while trying to maintain both their integrity and romantic lives.

All of Files’s novels are good, rollicking reads that play well to contemporary African American audiences, but they seldom rise above the level of entertainment. Files’s postmillennial novel, Child of God (2001) is more challenging material, exploring such as issues of sexuality, incest, and other taboos, and it is altogether more daring artistically and structurally than her previous works.

Flowers, Arthur R. (b. 1951, Memphis, Tennessee) Novelist and essayist Arthur R. Flowers is known for his politically charged and powerful fiction, which incorporates the language, local or regional nature, and rhythms of the blues. A student of John Oliver Killens’s writing workshops, Flowers is interested in using major events in African American history to show the resiliency of African Americans as a whole while indicting the conditions that have forced such flexibility. His first novel, De Mojo Blues: De Quest of High John De Conqueror (1985) is set in the early 1970s, when three Vietnam veterans return from the conflict and try to restart their lives in the Black Power era in different occupations. One of the protagonists, Tucept HighJohn, embodies and revises the African American folk character High John De Conqueror, a mainstay of New Orleans hoodoo conjuring, eventually becoming a true conjure man. He helps raise the consciousness of his Vietnam friends’ capacity for self-actualization, thereby occupying a role similar to that of conjure man Papa LaBas of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972). Another Good Loving Blues (1993) allows Flowers to take on the role of griot or narrator as he tells the story of conjure woman Melvira Dupress and her partner, Lucas Bodeen, a blues man, who illustrate the difficulties African Americans faced during the Great Migration of the twentieth century, in which some three million African Americans moved north and west from the South between 1910 and 1960. Mojo Rising: Confessions of a Twenty-first Century Conjureman (2001) is Flowers’s memoir, chronicling the adventures as a conjure man and blues musician that provided much of the material for his two novels.

Two scholarly essays on Flowers’s novels have appeared: Patricia R. Schoeder, “Root-work: Arthur Flowers, Zora Neale Hurston, and the ‘Literary Hoodoo’ Tradition,” AAR 36, no. 2 (Summer 2002); and Deborah Smith Pollard, “African American Holyground in Another Good Loving Blues,” CLA Journal 44, no. 1 (September 2000).

Forrest, Leon (b. January 8, 1937, Chicago, Illinois; d. November 6, 1997, Evanston, Illinois) Novelist, editor, and critic Leon Forrest was among the most complex of the writers to begin writing in the wake of the Black Arts Movement. Forrest stood apart from many of the period’s authors in openly embracing artistic ambitions over political ones, although his novels and short stories constantly include implicit and explicit commentaries upon the long-standing pattern of transcendence and declension that defined African American history in his view. He maintained a long, close friendship with Toni Morrison, who edited his first novel. Each of his four novels—There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden (1973), The Bloodworth Orphans (1977), Two Wings to Veil My Face (1984), and Divine Days (1992)—builds and draws upon the characters, situations, and themes of its predecessor to create an extensive epic that Forrest consciously modeled upon the achievements of James Joyce and Forrest’s friend Ralph Ellison.

Forrest’s ideas in all of his novels were shaped by a number of key factors, not the least of which was his upbringing on Chicago’s South Side by parents who represented a combination of ethnic (black and New Orleans Creole) and religious (Protestant and Catholic) backgrounds. The cultural mixture of these formative years helped convince Forrest of the fact of America’s multivalent ethnic, cultural, and religious composition. It also stood in contradistinction to Forrest’s later experiences as a soldier in the army, and as an associate, then managing editor at Muhammad Speaks, the official organ of the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist religious sect. Forrest spent over half a dozen years at the newspaper, which gave him a privileged view of the NOI’s inner machinery. Although Forrest came to disagree strongly with the NOI’s views, he also understood their appeal to many African Americans. In the end, however, Forrest found that the richness of his early years spoke more accurately to America’s past and promise. Nevertheless, he parlayed the tension between these different positions into his novels, most clearly in his last, Divine Days. All of Forrest’s novels are set in fictional Forrest County—pun intended—which bears a strong resemblance to Chicago’s Cook County. Forrest consistently weaves together black and white family histories and cultural markers (food, recreation, music, politics, and so on) as a metaphor for the American experience itself. In the spirit of Ralph Ellison’s query at the end of Invisible Man (1952)—“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”—Forrest asks whether African Americans and white Americans really do speak to and for one another as estranged members of the same national family.

There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden earned extensive praise upon its initial publication. It is the first novel in what would become a trilogy by introducing the fictional Forrest County and semiautobiographical protagonist Nathaniel Witherspoon, whose mother’s death provides the impetus for existential angst and extensive plumbing of his consciousness. The Bloodworth family, southern whites who once owned and helped beget Nathaniel’s ancestors, and a number of other characters recur and are expanded through the next two novels. The Bloodworth Orphans elaborates on the history of the Bloodworth family, using their relationship vis-à-vis the Witherspoon family as a metaphor for the heritage and history of African Americans. The Bloodworth family’s disownership of the black branch of their family signifies the many ways in which African Americans have been denied their true place in American history, what Ralph Ellison called “dispossession” in Invisible Man. In Two Wings to Veil My Face (1984), Nathaniel Witherspoon is haunted by his grandfather’s advice to “trouble, remember, and reveal,” which recalls the contrasting advice that Ellison’s Invisible Man received from his dying grandfather to “live with your head in the lion’s mouth … overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction.”^* Wither-spoon soon learns about his troubled genealogy; his grandmother Sweetie has no biological ties to him, while his grandfather had an affair that helps to illustrate simultaneously the fickle nature of love and the need to be resilient when love is either at an ebb or absent.

Forrest’s last novel, Divine Days, is the acme of his artistic career as well as the culmination and conclusion of his prior works. In fact, it would be fair to say that Divine Days both revises and comprises all of his earlier novels. At 1, 135 pages, it is undoubtedly the longest of all his works and one of the longest novels in American fiction in general. Similar to Irish author James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses (1922) and magnum opus Finnegans Wake (1939), to say nothing of Ralph Ellison’s Joycean Invisible Man or John Barth’s Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Forrest attempts a complete portrait of the concerns and issues that have helped to define all that is simultaneously virtuous and problematic within African American history and identity. Like its literary models, the narrative of Divine Days is cyclical, often returning to earlier events in the narrative or to moments in his earlier novels. Its epic retelling of one week in 1966 in the life of Joubert Aintoine Jones draws events from the Bloodworth trilogy, Forrest’s own life and experiences (especially his work with the Nation of Islam), the entire arc of early African American history from slavery to freedom, the Black Power era, and trends in African American literature, culture, and art since the 1960s. Its central motif is a question that tests the differences between generations, eras, “races,” and classes: “How can you destroy what we created?”

Scholarship on Forrest, especially on the enormous Divine Days, has been limited but thoughtful and thorough. The only extant book on Forrest is an anthology (albeit a strong one), John G. Cawelti, Leon Forrest: Introductions and Interpretations (1997), which includes an extensive bibliography. Dana Williams, “Preachin’ and Singin’ Just to Make It Over: The Gospel Impulse in Leon Forrest’s Bloodworth Trilogy,” is the most comprehensive assessment of Forrest’s early works to date and possibly the harbinger of the first single-author, book-length study of Forrest’s fiction as a whole. Other notable sources include: Callaloo 16, no. 2 (Spring 1993), which contains a special section on Forrest; Leon Forrest and Madhu Dubey, “The Mythos of Gumbo: Leon Forrest Talks about Divine Days” Callaloo 19, no. 3 (Summer 1996); Charles H. Rowell and Leon Forrest, “‘Beyond the Hard Work and Discipline’: An Interview with Leon Forrest,” Callaloo 20, no. 2 (Spring 1997).

Foster, Sharon Ewell (b. May 9, 1956, Marshall, Texas) Novelist Sharon Ewell Foster writes fiction intended primarily for the Christian community, but she has also won recognition for her novels’ ability to fuse a deep spirituality with harrowing portrayal social issues. Her first novel, Passing by Samaria (2000), is set in Mississippi and Chicago in 1919, one of the worst years of racial violence in American history. It centers upon young, black Alena Waterbridge, who discovers a friend’s lynched body in Mississippi and is consequently sent north by her parents to save her life. Once in Chicago, she becomes involved in the city’s black community and witnesses the racial violence that affects that city during a horrible riot. Alena eventually embraces her faith and learns the power of forgiveness. Ain’t No River, published in early 2001, indicts both materialism and employment discrimination against African Americans.

* Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1995), 16.