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Macarthur “Genius” Grants These John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowships—currently $500,000 paid over five years—are awarded annually (twice annually until 1984) to persons judged to possess extraordinary talent and potential in their given fields in the arts, sciences, humanities, and nonprofit organizations. Although the foundation keeps the deliberations that lead to individuals being nominated and selected a closely guarded secret and contends that its grants should not be considered “rewards” for work its recipients have completed, countless grants have clearly gone to those who have garnered significant notice due to one or more outstanding works or products. According to the official literature, “the MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.”^* All fellowships come with no strings attached; that is to say, for the duration of the individual’s program, he or she is not required to file any reports, attend any conferences, produce any work, or otherwise answer to anyone regarding the way the funds were used.

Since the program’s inception in 1981, many African American fiction writers and critics have benefited from its largesse. They are, by year: James Alan McPherson and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1981); Arnold Rampersad (1991); Stanley Crouch and John Edgar Wideman (1993); Octavia Butler and Virginia Hamilton (1995); Charles Johnson and Ishmael Reed (1998); Jacqueline Jones (1999); Patricia J. Williams (2000); and Colson Whitehead (2002). More information on all African Americans, in all fields of endeavor, who have been granted the award as of 1998 may be found in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 20 (Summer 1998): 30–31.

Mackey, Nathaniel (b. 1947, Miami, Florida) Nathaniel Mackey has written an extensive amount of poetry, prose fiction, essays, and criticism over four decades as a professor at the University of Southern California (1976–1979) and the University of California at Santa Cruz (1979–present). Mackey’s work tends to focus on jazz, both as a musical form in his criticism and as a metaphor in the other genres in which he works. Mackey is heavily influenced by the poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and music of such authors and composers as Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Denise Levertov, Aimé Césaire, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, Pharoah Sanders, and Anthony Braxton. His first two novels, Bedouin Hornbook (1986) and Djbot Baghostus’s Run (1993), are part of From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, a trilogy (thus far) continued with Atet A.D. (2001). Each novel is epistolary, comprising letters from complex, ironic characters—often jazz musicians—to the “Angel of Dust,” who is deeply immersed in the world of music, including the exploitative industry that surrounds it. Various excerpts from the novels were published in different journals and magazines prior to their collection and publication in book form.

Many of the novels’ letters focus on the history and meaning of jazz and the artists who shaped its development and made it a centerpiece of African American and American culture. For Mackey and his characters, jazz is very much an intellectual concern that has the power to invade the soul and transform the individual, but its intellectualism rarely, if ever, stands in the way of its spirituality and warmth. As Mackey indicated in one interview, music “includes so much: it’s social, it’s religious, it’s metaphysical, it’s aesthetic, it’s expressive, it’s creative, it’s destructive. It just covers so much. It’s the biggest, most inclusive thing that [he] could put forth if [he] were to choose one single thing.”^* Mackey’s novels are thus populated with punningly named characters derived from African American and world folklore (e.g., the Angel of Dust, Aunt Nancy, the djinns Djeannine and Djbot Baghostus [also known as Flaunted Fifth, Jarred Bottle, Djbouche, DB, etc.) as well as musical figures (Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Pharoah Sanders, Sonny Rollins, Louis Armstrong, Albert Ayler, and innumerable others) whose compositions are analyzed and used to evoke moods, begin or end plot points, and as metaphors for different characters and their quirks. All of these characters and figures represent the possibilities found within music, literature, and intellectual thought that encompass all the areas Mackey speaks of in his interview. Mackey sees music as a vehicle for “challenging and questioning … categories” and for the mixing of “things that defy and redefine boundary lines,” which are “very important in the literary politics, cultural politics, and marginalized social politics of the time we’re living in.”^* Beyond his own fiction, Mackey’s belief in jazz’s power is reflected in his anthology, Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry in Prose (1993), coedited with Art Lange. The volume includes the work of many major writers, including Melvin Tolson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Cecil Taylor, Abdullah Ibrahim (formerly known as Dollar Brand), Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Michael Ondaatje, Michael S. Harper, Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, and Quincy Troupe.

Critical and scholarly attention to Mackey’s novels has not been prolific, but it is almost invariably positive, generous, and attentive to Mackey’s extensive, if not exhaustive knowledge of jazz’s history and cultural significance. The aforementioned interview with Mackey, found in Callaloo 18, no. 2 (Spring 1995), is one of the best introductions to Mackey’s own thoughts about his prose and poetry, including his influences. A better, albeit slightly less accessible source is Mackey’s own scholarly book, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993), which argues for the writing and reading of literature as a means to interpreting culture and allowing individual voices to speak and obtain agency.

Magical realism “Magical realism” refers to a literary mode that incorporates and fuses a number of different features. These include mixing of environments, such as the urban with the rural, the real with the fantastic, black/African with white/European, or the present with the past and potential future. A good number of works experiment radically with authorial perspective or narrative techniques and voices. Magical realism is best known for weaving elements of the supernatural and mystical seamlessly into texts that are otherwise realistic in their structure, organization, and content. When these supernatural elements take on human form, they coexist on this plane with the narrative’s “real” characters, and frequently function as symbols for ideas elucidated elsewhere in the text. More often than not, these figures are the very embodiment of other notions or element.

The mode is most frequently associated with author Gabriel García Márquez, especially his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), but has found favor with the muses of quite a few African American authors, most prominently Gayl Jones (Eva’s Man and Corregidora), Charles Johnson (Middle Passage), Paule Marshall (Praisesong for the Widow), Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise), Gloria Naylor (Linden Hills and Mama Day), Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, The Terrible Twos, and The Terrible Threes), Tina McElroy Ansa (Baby of the Family), and John Edgar Wideman (Damballah).

For many of these authors, the mystical elements are drawn directly from mythological figures and folklore from Africa and the African Diaspora, especially tricksters and trickster gods, folk legends, creation myths, religions (particularly vodun/voodoo/hoodoo and Santería, or Regla de Ocha). Others blend African American folklore with European myths, motifs, and literary texts. This may be seen in Naylor’s Linden Hills and Mama Day, which play off The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (thirteenth century) and The Tempest by William Shakespeare (1611), and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, a mix of Jonathan Swift, African religion, Plato’s Republic, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and many other texts.

These texts’ uses of magical realism vary widely, but most attempt to compose allegories representing specific problems concerning either African American communities or America as a whole, especially in a postmodern era in which many past values are being reconsidered as new views of history and culture find their way into the mainstream. Many of these works might therefore be classified under the larger rubric of postmodernism, although postmodern works are not normally associated with the supernatural.

Major, Clarence (b. 1936; Atlanta, Georgia) Any careful, complete discussion of postmodern African American literature must eventually mention Clarence Major. As Bernard Bell attests, Major stands, along with Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Toni Cade Bambara, John Edgar Wideman, and Ishmael Reed, as one of the African American “modernists and postmodernists” who are “rediscovering and reaffirming the power and wisdom of their own vernacular expressive tradition: African American ways of seeing, knowing, and expressing reality” that simultaneously diverge from and converge with the philosophical and literary traditions that inform postmodernity (6). Like Reed in particular, Major’s short stories and novels have both perplexed and delighted critics and students with their complexity, their often seamless and ubiquitous references to popular cultural icons and history, and their attention to hidden histories. Major has not, however, enjoyed the same degree of familiarity and popularity among African American and academic audiences as other experimental contemporaries, despite his founding of Coercion Review, cofounding of the Fiction Collective publishing house, and his eight novels, thirteen poetry collections, a collection of short stories, and hundreds of poems and short stories in various journals and magazines spanning more than five decades. This relative dearth of attention may be attributed to the challenge that Major’s metafictional innovations tend to pose to the casual reader.

Major’s fiction is marked by its tacit avoidance of social realist conventions. While it would be highly inaccurate to say that Major’s fiction is apolitical, ideological considerations are clearly second to the fictive world’s own logic and organization, both of which reflect the feelings and thoughts of the narrators and their voices. Language’s power to enable or obscure our perception of reality is the focus of his fiction in much the same way that an expressionist painter foregrounds the possibilities and limits of the paint medium. Fittingly, Major is also an accomplished painter in the expressionist style; his early artistic influences were divided almost equally between such painters as Cézanne, Munch, Degas, van Gogh, and Picasso; such writers as Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Willard Motley, Chester Himes, and Rimbaud; and jazz music.^* Major’s artistic philosophy is therefore quite consistent, inasmuch as he has emphasized repeatedly that his works are designed to keep the reader “constantly focused on the page” and the narrative voice.^* His novels in particular take on their “own reality and [are] really independent of anything outside [themselves],” and they need not be “reflection[s] of anything” outside the text’s world.^*

This focus upon the page, of the text’s status qua text, is the hallmark of the metafiction or surfiction movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In No (1973), Major’s second novel (All Night Visitors was his first, in 1969) the narrator/protagonist attempts to come to grips with his identity as a developing adult, particularly in terms of his evolution as a sexual being. In Major’s conscious attempt to incorporate a reading of Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus complex theory, it is difficult to tell the narrator from his father. Both are called by the same name at various points, and the narrator simply finds himself struggling with his father’s legacies—particularly the father’s murder of his own family in order to save them from suffering in a world of bigotry and prejudice. In the process, Major pushes the bounds of the narrator’s linguistic abilities and consciousness.

In what is arguably his most challenging novel, Reflex and Bone Structure (1975), Major highlights the narrator’s role as the creator and controller of the every last component within the narrative by creating a world in which the utterly fantastic and the realistic exist side by side, with few indications that this reality is unreal. One character, Canada, may just as easily be the narrator’s alter ego as not, and the characters and their fates are equally controlled by the author as by the characters. Emergency Exit (1979) is equally challenging. It combines a narrative about personal relationships with twenty-six of Major’s own paintings, defying generic conventions of both media, especially since, according to Major, the paintings were selected for their ability to move or delay the narrative’s rhythm and momentum; they do not intentionally illustrate any particular scenes within the written narrative.^*

My Amputations (1986) builds upon Emergency Exit’s experiments, concerned as the former is with Major’s interest in the barriers that divide artistic genres, cultural and artistic traditions, identities, and parts of the individual’s psyche from one another. The protagonist, Mason Ellis, is an African American expatriate artist living in Europe (as Major did for much of the first half of the 1980s) who confronts all of the influences that have contributed to his personal and artistic identity. Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar (1988), in turn, plays upon its predecessor; it is an experimental novel that expands the story of Painted Turtle, the Zuni (Native American) folksinger who originally appeared in My Amputations. Her struggles to maintain her cultural and artistic integrity in the face of cultural change form the novel’s crux. The narrative experiments both with form and with subject matter; it is one of very few depictions of a Native American culture and life by someone outside that culture that rings true, according to an authoritative contemporary review,^* via its attention to cultural traditions and its refusal to condescend to different Native American cultures. Painted Turtle also won the honor of being a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year. Fun and Games: Short Fictions (1990) is Major’s first collection of its kind. Most of the stories are again experimental, with the subject matter focusing largely upon semi-autobiographical tales of personal growth, with no small amount of wry, yet sympathetic humor.

Not all of Major’s texts are as challenging as his earlier, experimental fiction. Since the 1980s, Major’s prolific fiction output has been more accessible but never pedestrian. Each novel or short story experiments in some way with voice, temporality, folk culture, and various political issues. Two of his more recent efforts, Such Was the Season (1987) and Dirty Bird Blues (1996), are more conventional in their style and subject matter, taking as their foci the resonance of folk idioms, especially the blues, in African Americans’ life and culture. The plots concern attempts to reconnect with cultural roots and a blues musician’s struggles for survival and meaning in America, respectively. These two novels may be Major’s most accessible works, but they are still challenging in their attempt to plumb the complex relationship between a people’s existence and their artistic creations.

The critical response to Major’s work has been at once extensive and impressive. This response primarily comprises journal articles and book chapters, but critic Bernard Bell recently collected many of these into one volume, Clarence Major and His Art (2001), easily the best introduction to the numerous readings of his work that have emerged in the last thirty years of the millennium. It includes selections from Major’s poetry, excerpts from his fiction, interviews, and critical essays on all aspects of his artistic endeavors. Most of the critical essays included were first published in AAR 28, no. 1 (Spring 1994), a special issue devoted to Major. The most appropriate companion to Bell’s collection is Major’s own gathering of his nonfiction, Necessary Distance: Essays and Criticism (2001). In October 2002, the University Press of Mississippi published an essential collection of interviews, Conversations with Clarence Major, edited by Nancy Bunge.

Major has generated an extensive corpus of scholarly journal articles. Besides the aforementioned special issue of AAR and the other essays included in Bell’s volume (many of which were published as journal articles in other issues of AAR), the Summer 1979 issue of BALF (vol. 13, issue 2) is also devoted to Major’s work, including a bibliography of his published work compiled by Joe Weixlmann. The following articles are also among the most helpful and significant: Joe Weixlmann, “African American Deconstruction of the Novel in the Work of Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major,” MELUS 17, no. 4 (Winter 1991–1992); Larry D. Bradfield, “Beyond Mimetic Exhaustion: The Reflex and Bone Structure Experiment,” BALF 17, no. 3 (Autumn 1983).

Marshall, Paule (b. Valenza Pauline Burke, 1929, Brooklyn, New York) Paule Marshall’s career as a writer began in 1959, when her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones was published at a time when very few African American women authors had their works in print.^* She has since published many works of short fiction (including two collections) and four additional novels; all have received extensive praise and critical attention. She is one of many African American authors of Caribbean descent—Marshall’s parents were second-generation Barbadian immigrants—who have repeatedly tried to reconcile that heritage with the situation of Americans of African descent in their fiction. In this regard, she may be compared to Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde and Edwidge Danticat, all of whom emerged as major writers since 1970.

While her earlier work is certainly excellent and groundbreaking, Marshall’s work since 1970—Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Reena and Other Stories (1983), Daughters (1991), and The Fisher King (2000)—have received the most attention. Praisesong for the Widow is perhaps Marshall’s masterpiece and is the novel that scholars have studied most frequently, particularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It also won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 1984. Praisesong is a neo–slave narrative (see separate entry) that tells the story of Avatara “Avey” Johnson, a middle-class African American woman who finds herself drawn to the Caribbean island of Carriacou while on a cruise to Grenada. Once she arrives on Grenada, Avey begins to recall her life with her deceased husband Jerome “Jay” Johnson, which went from a relationship of love and affection to coldness, miserliness, and distrust as they moved upward economically. She then books passage on an excursion to Carriacou, where she connects with her African roots by channeling the spirits of her African ancestors in the Big Drum ceremony on the island. This helps Avey see the links between her African ancestors and her hometown in South Carolina. In deeply moving prose, Marshall revisits her project of drawing links between the peoples of the African Diaspora that began with Brown Girl, Brownstones. Marshall also published Reena and Other Stories in 1983, short stories about West Indian women, especially Marshall’s grandmother (a.k.a. Da-Duh), who displayed strength and determination in the face of racial and sexual oppression. Her best known short story, “To Da-Duh, in Memoriam,” is found here, along with Marshall’s landmark introductory essay, “From the Poets in the Kitchen.”

Daughters (1991) is the story of Ursa McKenzie, a consumer researcher living in Manhattan and the daughter of an influential politician on the mythical Caribbean island of Triunion. In a parallel reference to the island nation’s name, three plots dominate the novel: the corruption of Ursa’s father as he caves in to the offers of white developers; the similar corruption of a black politician in a city where Ursa had conducted a study; Ursa’s own struggle with the decision to have an abortion after her mother had had many miscarriages before giving birth to Ursa, her only child. Each plot concerns situations in which individuals have to deal with the legacy and burden of the sacrifices made on their behalf in the past, raising questions of their responsibilities, whether real or perceived, to those who went before them or who may follow.

The Fisher King (2000) is set in Brooklyn and Paris of the 1940s through the 1980s. It is the saga of the McCullum and Payne families, whose matriarchs, Florence McCullum and Ulene Payne, are drawn together in part due to the pride they have for their respective musical children, Cherisse McCullum and Everett “Sonny-Rett” Payne. Cherisse and Sonny-Rett later reject their classical training in favor of jazz, much to the chagrin of their families, marry each other, and flee to Paris to escape the wrath their choices engender, as well as the racism that jazz musicians could expect in America. In the meantime, the two families break apart and begin a bitter forty-year feud, blaming each other for the children’s departure from both the United States and their classical discipline. Eventually the families resolve their differences with the help of Sonny-Rett and Cherisse’s grandson and a performance of Sonny-Rett’s great music. The novel ultimately celebrates family ties, the richness of Caribbean heritage, the redemptive power of love, and especially jazz music.

Scholarship on Marshall is extensive, having grown tremendously since the publication of Praisesong for the Widow. Notable books include: Stelamaris Coser, Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones (1995); Dorothy Hamer Denniston, The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender (1995); Simone A. James Alexander, Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (2001); Eugenia C. DeLamotte, Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall (1998). Notable journal articles include: Harihar Kulkarni, “Paule Marshall: A Bibliography,” Callaloo 16, no. 1 (Winter 1993); Linda Pannill, “From the ‘Wordshop’: The Fiction of Paule Marshall,” MELUS 12, no. 2 (Summer 1985); Missy Dehn Kubitschek, “Paule Marshall’s Women on Quest,” BALF 21, nos. 1–2 (Spring-Summer 1987); Jane Olmsted, “The Pull to Memory and the Language of Place in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Praisesong for the Widow,” AAR 31, no. 2 (Summer 1997).

McElroy, Colleen (b. Colleen Johnson, 1935, St. Louis, Missouri) Colleen McElroy is best known for her poetry, which she has been publishing since 1968. In that capacity, she has been called “the best, most balanced black woman poet working today.”^* Her short fiction, however, has garnered limited but respectable reviews. McElroy has authored two short-story collections: Jesus and Fat Tuesday and Other Short Stories (1987) and Driving Under the Cardboard Pines and Other Stories (1990). The former contains fourteen stories set in the American Midwest, with African American protagonists—often women—that discover the possibilities of imagination when the physical world becomes too limiting for them. The stories in Driving Under follow the same eclectic pattern as the first collection, with an emphasis on piercing cross-cultural boundaries. McElroy’s style is reminiscent of her stunning poetry, with languid lines that match the openness of the characters’ minds as they tap into their creative energies. McElroy has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation (to aid in the writing of her 1999 travel memoir, Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar), and a Fulbright Creative Writing Fellowship.

McElroy’s works are anthologized in Gloria Naylor, ed., Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present (1995); Bill Mullen, ed., Revolutionary Tales: African American Women’s Short Stories: From the First Story to the Present (1995); Terry McMillan, ed., Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction (1990); and Craig Lesley, ed., Dreamers and Desperadoes: Contemporary Short Fiction of the American West (1993). Very little scholarly attention has been paid to McElroy’s work, unfortunately, but she is profiled in Lynda Koolish, African American Writers: Portraits and Visions (2001); and Joyce Owens Pettis, African American Poets: Lives, Works, and Sources (2002). McElroy, a professor of creative writing at the University of Washington, has also edited the Seattle Review.

McKnight, Reginald (b. 1956, Germany) Reginald McKnight built a respectable place for himself among contemporary writers with stories he began publishing in the late 1980s, which were represented in his first book, Moustapha’s Eclipse (1988), the winner of the Drue Heinze Literature Prize for that year. McKnight’s stories and novels are eclectic in their subject matter; he attempts to write characters from many different groups, backgrounds, and perspectives, with a special ear for their speech patterns and idiosyncrasies. In the case of African Americans, McKnight actively and consciously avoids falling into common stereotypes, literary or otherwise, regarding black lives and identities. The same may be said of most of his characters, many of whom frequently find themselves forced to reconsider their prejudgments. In the ten stories in Moustapha’s Eclipse, for example, several different types of Americans discover that the ways they expected people from other ethnic groups or cultures to behave were based in simplistic understandings of those cultures. The truth is far more complex, with identity determined less by biology than by circumstance.

Similarly, in McKnight’s first novel, I Get on the Bus (1990), African American Evan Norris travels to Senegal to rediscover a black identity lost in pursuit of a middle-class lifestyle and subsequently finds that identity cannot be acquired or reshaped by mere travel; he must grasp the fact that African cultures are highly complicated and nuanced. McKnight’s second short-story collection, The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas (1991) comprises seven stories that force a reconsideration of everything from the Civil Rights Movement and Great Society programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson to crack addiction, to sexuality and art. In addition to the Drue Heinze Literature Prize, McKnight has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, two Kenyon Review Awards for Literary Excellence (1989 and 1992), a Pushcart Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Special Citation, the O. Henry Award (1990), and a Whiting Writer’s Award.

Interest in McKnight, scholarly or otherwise, has grown with each book. His work has been heavily anthologized; it may be found in Charles H. Rowell, ed., Ancestral House: the Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe (1995); Don Belton, ed., Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream (1995); and Gloria Naylor, ed., Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African American Short Stories (1993). Relevant articles include: Bertram D. Ashe, “‘Under the Umbrella of Black Civilization’: A Conversation with Reginald McKnight,” AAR 35, no. 3 (Fall 2001).

McMillan, Rosalyn (b. 1954, Port Huron, Michigan) Novelist Rosalyn McMillan is the younger sister of bestselling Terry McMillan and a highly popular author in her own right. Her novels’ main strengths are in their depiction of male-female relationships; both Knowing (1994) and One Better (1997) plumb this territory in ways similar to other African American writers who emerged in the mid-1990s with novels about African Americans’ relationships. That is to say, McMillan weaves the complexities of romantic relationships and such social problems as drug abuse, domestic violence, prostitution, and poverty into the lives of the black professionals who populate her novels. McMillan’s later novels, however, foreground social ills to a greater degree, with mixed results. Blue Collar Blues (1998), for example, is based directly upon the twenty years McMillan spent working in a Ford Motors plant prior to her writing career. Her portrait of the conflicts between labor and management highlights class issues not only within American society in general but also within African American communities. The two principals, Thyme Tyler and Khan Davis, are a manager and blue-collar worker, respectively, in an automobile plant, which tests the limits of their friendship when labor disputes arise. The Flip Side of Sin (2000) is McMillan’s most ambitious novel. It tells the story of Isaac Coleman, a musician and journalist who attempts to reconcile with his estranged wife, Kennedy (who becomes a police officer in Isaac’s absence), and teenage son after spending twelve years in prison for vehicular manslaughter. The novel generally places romantic elements deeply in the background for a complex dose of social realism that examines the inequities and inadequacies of the justice system.

McMillan, Terry (b. October 18, 1951, Port Huron, Michigan) When novelist and editor Terry McMillan’s third novel, Waiting to Exhale (1992; see separate entry) was published, the popular response it generated inarguably changed the direction and reception of African American literature for the rest of the 1990s. Waiting to Exhale touched a demographic segment of the American populace—primarily middle-class, professional women of varied ethnic and “racial” backgrounds—that found their experiences and thoughts about modern relationships reflected in McMillan’s characters. The novel became a publishing sensation, selling over 2.5 million copies and enlivening the black reading audience. These developments moved major publishers—many of whom previously considered African Americans to be nonreaders at worst and a generally moribund market at best—actively to seek out and publish the manuscripts of black writers, especially those of the Sister or “Girlfriend” Novel subgenre (see separate entry), at an unprecedented rate. Although McMillan herself exploited this trend to some extent with the largely autobiographical How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996), each of her novels is distinct in both style and substance. McMillan also played a crucial role in opening the public to the new wave of African American fiction with the publication of her anthology, Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction (1990), featuring most of the major and minor talents of the 1980s and 1990s.

Although not quite the sensation that Waiting to Exhale would become, McMillan’s Mama (1987) was a bestseller even before its initial publication due to the author’s aggressive marketing and promotional skills. Protagonist Mildred Peacock’s story is held together by this mother’s attempts to keep her relationships with her immediate and larger family intact, but it is also a retrospective on the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, as well as upon African Americans’ quests for cultural identities in the wake of those movements. Mildred’s struggle is to transcend the roles with which a patriarchal society would circumscribe her, especially after so many individuals and groups had sought to liberate women like her.

Disappearing Acts (1989) is a romance between protagonists Zora Banks and Franklin Swift set in an urban environment. It is an inspired revision of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) to the extent that it tries to expand the vocabulary of love for African Americans in contemporary society by using the voices and perspectives of the principals as sympathetically as possible. Disappearing Acts helps illustrate McMillan’s skill with everyday vernacular language, although it is quite explicit. Waiting to Exhale takes this explicitness even further, as the four principals, all professional, middle-class black women with failed or broken relationships with husbands and other male partners, discuss frankly the heartache they have encountered. How Stella Got Her Groove Back tells, in a controversial stream-of-consciousness style, of forty-two-year-old protagonist Stella’s journey to Jamaica, where she finds herself revitalized by a relationship with a man twenty years her junior. In addition to offering hope to women working through heartache, the novel questions societal double standards regarding age in relationships.

Beyond book reviews, scholarship on McMillan has been relatively limited and restricted to journal articles and book chapters. What presently exists, however, is generally sympathetic to McMillan’s projects: E. Shelley Reid, “Beyond Morrison and Walker: Looking Good and Looking Forward in Contemporary Black Women’s Stories,” AAR 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000); Rita B. Dandridge, “Debunking the Motherhood Myth in Terry McMillan’s Mama,” CLA Journal 41, no. 4 (June 1998); Janet Mason Ellerby, “Deposing the Man of the House: Terry McMillan Rewrites the Family,” MELUS 22, no. 2 (Summer 1997).

McPherson, James Alan (b. 1943, Savannah, Georgia) Short-story writer and essayist James Alan McPherson made his first significant mark on the literary scene with his collection Hue and Cry (1969), which explores the effects of racism upon the principal characters, who frequently suffer from loneliness and alienation in a culture and nation that fails to affirm their possibilities. These themes may be found throughout the majority of the Harvard Law School graduate’s stories and essays, particularly the essay “On Becoming an American Writer,” published in The Atlantic Monthly (December 1978). That essay was published immediately after McPherson’s star truly began to rise with the publication of Elbow Room (1977), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction (1978). The twelve stories in Elbow Room quietly decry definitions of American identity that deny the centrality of African Americans to the nation’s identity, and the book vigorously asserts African Americans’ American-ness. Since Elbow Room’s publication, McPherson’s literary output has been restricted to essays and editing; Mc-Pherson edited the Fall 1985 and Fall 1990 fiction issues of the journal Ploughshares McPherson also won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973–74 and was inducted in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995.

Critical scholarship on McPherson has focused greatly upon his essays, but he is frequently mentioned as a major figure in African American literature due to Elbow Room’s prestige and popularity. Key books include McPherson’s autobiography, Crabcakes (1998), his book of essays, A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile (2000), and Herman Beavers’s Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson (1995). Key journal articles include: Herman Beavers, “I Yam What You Is and You Is What I Yam: Rhetorical Invisibility in James Alan McPherson’s ‘The Story of a Dead Man,’” Callaloo 29 (Autumn 1986); and Jon Wallace, “The Politics of Style in Three Stories by James Alan McPherson,” Modern Fiction Studies 34, no. 1 (Spring 1988).

Morrison, Toni (b. Chloe Anthony Wofford. February 18, 1931, Lorain, Ohio) Toni Morrison’s novels have been highly praised for their lyricism and tendency to reify and “evoke [African American] folklore and [African American] mythology, as well as recodings of Black oral traditions” in order to preserve them.^* Concomitantly, Morrison’s fiction is notable for its understated subversion of totalizing African American mythologies, especially those of African American communities from the urban North to the rural Midwest or South. Rather than being a fixed ontology, identity in Morrison’s novels is formed and revised by a nondeterministic process in which one cause does not necessarily lead to a specific effect. As Melvin Dixon argues, “her novels are bildungsromans of entire communities and racial idioms rather than the voice of a single individual,” with a central protagonist developing only after interactions with larger communities.^* Once those interactions have been completed, though, these texts defer the necessity to declare one narrative voice authoritative. To do so would mean Morrison’s African American characters reproducing the hegemonic power of racism rather than dispersing and defying it, an outcome that would lead to the destruction of both communities and individuals, engendering what Orlando Patterson has called “social death.”^*

Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (see separate entry) was a stunning debut that has inspired debate over the many issues it discovers in contemporary African American politics. Its depiction of Pecola Breed-love, a young African American girl driven to an insane love of blue eyes and white features after being emotionally neglected by her mother and molested by her father, raises as many questions about internal hatreds found within African American communities as it does about the system of white supremacy that engendered them.

Morrison’s second novel, Sula (1974) is set in the small Ohio town of Medallion, where the African American population lives in a community called the Bottom. The protagonists, Sula Peace and her friend Nel Wright, come from very different classes but have bonds as deep as they are unspoken. As they grow into women, Nel and Sula’s friendship becomes strained by secret shames, shared resentment, and the chasm of class that stands between their families. Nel enters into a stale, domesticated marriage, while Sula travels around the country, returning to become a pariah in the Bottom for her many sexual relationships with the town’s men, regardless of their marital status.

Sula epitomizes Morrison’s desire to focus on women’s friendships and nonsexual relationships outside of a homosexual context, and it is a perfect illustration of the womanism (see separate entry) that author Alice Walker champions. Both Sula and Nel are troubled and damaged by their respective paths, yet the novel never treats them as pathological symbols. They are fully human in all of their desires and actions and, true to the rest of Morrison’s characters, can never be reduced to stereotypes, even as the novel tempts us to do so. Morrison does her characters justice by giving them the ability to remember and compare their past and present. From these memories come identities that constantly evolve to the novel’s end.

Song of Solomon (1977; see separate entry), first brought Morrison major national attention and acclaim. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978, sold tremendously well, and began her long career as a favorite on college reading lists, an honor soon extended to her earlier and subsequent works. Only Beloved (1987) has rivaled Song of Solomon in terms of essays, citations, and sheer influence.

Song of Solomon is the saga of Macon “Milkman” Dead and his middle-class family, which contains and represses a number of secrets not unlike those found within Morrison’s earlier works. By rediscovering the legacy of the Dead family’s mythical African ancestors, Milkman eventually confronts his own membership in a staunchly patriarchal lineage, thereby learning to appreciate the cultural riches and complexity of African American history. Milkman is the third Macon Dead, but he earns his nickname after one of the family’s tenants witnesses him suckling at his mother’s breast when he is eight years old. That act, along with the violent relationship between Milkman and Hagar, the lover he spurned, signify the desire the novel’s women have to find intimate connections to their own womanhood and humanity in a community that systematically attempts to consign them to irrelevancy. Milkman’s father, the second Macon Dead, takes pains to distance himself emotionally from other African Americans, his own past, his sister Pilate, and his family, most notably his wife and daughters, who desperately seek sustaining love elsewhere. The Dead family’s name thus acts as a trope for the potential death of African American communities’ history and bonds unless they are nurtured through memory and celebration. Milkman leaves his Great Lakes community for Virginia in search of a rumored lost family treasure that his father and Pilate, Milkman’s aunt, had hidden in their youth. Along the way, Milkman slowly picks up clues to his heritage, eventually discovering that he is descended from the same Africans found in a traditional folktale about Africans who could once fly, but lost their ability in slavery. Milkman learns greater respect for other people, especially women, and a greater sense of his connection to a larger community of African Americans.

Tar Baby (1981) centers upon fashion model Jadine “Jade” Childs’s desire for an authentic African American identity after she encounters and enters into a tempestuous relationship with William “Son” Green, who possesses and taunts Jadine with the authenticity she lacks. Jadine is the niece of Ondine and Sydney Childs, who raised her fully in the ideals of white society as they worked for retired confectioner Valerian Street and his wife Margaret—both white—on the mythical Isle de Chevaliers in the Caribbean. As Son, who had fled service on a merchant ship, becomes a part of the Street household, he confronts Jadine for failing to understand and appreciate the particularly Floridian African American culture in which he is deeply immersed, while she berates him for his failure to succeed in the “white” world as represented by cosmopolitan New York City. Their arguments form the crux of the novel and open a space for Morrison to explore the stereotypes that whites, blacks, women, and men hold about one another and often apply to themselves to limit their horizons and personal growth.

Until recently, Tar Baby held the dubious honor as the least-studied of Morrison’s novels, particularly compared to the novels that immediately preceded and followed it. Some of the reasons for this neglect may be found in contemporary reviews, which found the novel different from Morrison’s previous work and therefore inferior. Critics commonly cited the prominence of dialogue and intrusive narration, complaining that these elements replaced the lyricism for which Morrison had earned so much praise and did not serve as well to move the plot and convey the novel’s symbolic value. The dialogue, however, resounds with issues as complex and irresolvable as those found anywhere in Morrison’s oeuvre. The difficulty of the novel’s bold exploration of racial stereotypes and hypocrisy might have discouraged scholars for a while, but by the 1990s Tar Baby had come into its own as the object of careful study.

“Recitatif” (1983), is Morrison’s only published short story, but it matches her novels in both ambition and complexity. Situated midway between the publication of two of Morrison’s novels, it extends Tar Baby’s inquiry into the nature of stereotypes and heralds the ambiguity at the heart of Beloved (1987). It follows the lives of two young women, Roberta and Twyla, who meet after their respective mothers deposit them in an orphanage and grow up and apart. One is white, the other black, but the story never identifies clearly which one is which. Instead, Morrison bestows the characters and their situations with numerous cultural markers and stereotypes that whites and blacks frequently hold about each other regarding hair textures, dancing, sexuality, music, political and social issues, and so on. The story’s title refers to a vocal mode in opera that conveys skeletal information of the performance’s plot, leaving the details to the aria to follow. Similarly, “Recitatif” leaves out the markers that would allow readers the comfort of easily identifying Twyla or Roberta’s “race,” thereby undermining many of the expectations those same readers might have about each culture or even about a story by African American author Toni Morrison. It purposefully undermines the identities of all these parties to force a reconsideration of our definitions of blackness and whiteness in the American context.

Beloved (see separate entry) is arguably Morrison’s masterpiece, and one of the most celebrated and widely studied contemporary novels extant, African American or otherwise. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988 and in all likelihood earned Morrison the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The novel remains extremely popular, especially on college and university campuses, and has inspired dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and even entire books. Although many of these discuss the novel in conjunction with other works, quite a few are devoted to the novel alone. Director Jonathan Demme also adapted it into a motion picture in 1998, to modest critical and commercial success.

Beloved is based upon the case of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who slew her infant daughter and attempted to kill her young sons in 1856. The novel centers upon Sethe Suggs, who, like Garner, escaped while pregnant into Ohio from brutal, humiliating enslavement on a Kentucky farm, giving birth on the way. She obtains freedom but is pursued and discovered by her former slaveholder, “Schoolteacher.” Again like her model, Sethe slays her infant daughter and attempts to kill her sons, who are saved by her husband’s mother, and Sethe is jailed for her offense. Sethe is eventually freed from her physical prison, only to be confined to a psychological one by the ghost of her slain daughter. This spirit haunts Sethe’s house, 124 Bluestone Road, and her fragmented family. When Paul D, whom Sethe knew as a fellow slave, comes to 124 and begins an intimate relationship with Sethe, he drives the spirit away temporarily, but it soon returns as a physical familiar, Beloved. Beloved soon manipulates Sethe into devoting all of her attentions to futile attempts at making amends with her daughter. This effort slowly devours Sethe until the townsfolk help drive the spirit away.

One of the crucial controversies within and surrounding the novel centers upon whether Beloved is real or, more likely, a multivalent metaphor for several issues that may haunt African Americans collectively: the legacy of slavery, generational conflicts, the difficulty of progress, the intractability of racism, self-hatred, the silencing of African American voices, women’s struggles within the larger African American community, and the struggle to create new possibilities in the face of all of these adversities. The novel may also be read as Morrison’s apocalyptic fictional meditation upon the successes and failures of either postbellum black America or of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, to the extent that each period was a turning point for African Americans, rife with ambiguity and ambivalence. Similarly, each of the novel’s characters wishes to confront and overcome the horrors of the past and present yet struggles with her or his desire to nurse pain and hatred, even if it is self-destructive.

Like Tar Baby before it, the critical community either neglected or avoided Jazz (1992) as it tried to unpack its many complexities and challenges. It arguably stands as Morrison’s most artistically ambitious work to date, save perhaps for “Recitatif.” It is the second book in the trilogy comprising Beloved and Paradise (1997), linked to the others via its tracing of a crucial period of African American history extending from slavery through the Harlem, or “New Negro” Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, the novel’s present. This act of tracing finds a symbol in one of the main characters, Joe Trace, who was born of a wild woman who, according to some convincing interpretations, bears a passing resemblance to the ghost of the Sethe’s murdered baby in Beloved. The novel never makes that connection unequivocally clear, in part because the story itself is told by a narrator whose identity is equally ambiguous and who flits between the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives. Several signs in the text indicate that the narrator may very well be the novel itself, highlighting one of the novel’s central questions: Is it possible for African Americans to agree upon a single interpretation or understanding of black experiences and identities, whether through art or other means?

Despite this unreliable narrator, the text establishes two plots: that of the novel’s protagonists, Joe and Violet Trace, and that of our expectations about the possibilities surrounding African Americans’ political future. In both plots, Morrison writes against the idea of African American identity and its characterization as sets of discrete, yet predictable ontological positions. Joe and Violet Trace’s relationship is troubled but not destroyed by the middle-aged Joe’s affair with a young woman, Dorcas, whom he later murders when he discovers her in the company of a younger man. The narrative proper begins, in fact, with an account of Violet’s assault upon Dorcas’s body at her funeral. This particular plot begins as simple melodrama but immediately becomes layered with histories of the main characters that twist, turn, and reach back to antebellum times until shifts and generic conventions that fall well outside those of melodrama, beginning with the characters. Joe and Violet Trace’s marriage and later actions cannot comfortably be reduced to stereotypes, dismissed, or underestimated, acts far too tempting for both the narrator and perhaps the reader. Joe and Violet’s migration from their original Virginia to New York is at once a romance, a tragedy, and an allegory of the progress of African American identities in their time and ours.

Morrison also published Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in 1992. The book comprises a series of lectures Morrison delivered at Harvard to address what she perceived as academics’ reluctance to address fully the centrality of the black presence in American culture. She calls for an “American Africanism,” a method of creating black literary figures who allow readers to explore America in all of its contradictions. Playing in the Dark has since become an influential analysis of American fiction.

Paradise (1997) extends Jazz’s probe into the nature of “racial” progress by positing Ruby, Oklahoma, a fictional black town founded in the aftermath of the Civil War. Like the historical all-black settlements upon which it was based, the formerly enslaved people who founded the town of Haven (later renamed Ruby for a resident who died when Haven was moved to its present location) envisioned it as a potential Eden, a paradise on Earth that would free and shelter them from the oppression and racism in the larger American society. These freedoms come with high prices: a growing intolerance for dissent and diversity and the widespread oppression of women by the town’s men. In the novel’s present, that intolerance has fostered a rift between Ruby’s older generation, which would preserve their perception of the town’s legacy, and the younger generation seeking a more progressive and militant future. Their conflict revolves around the meaning of the obscured words inscribed on the town’s communal oven, the preeminent symbol of its past, present, and future. Ironically, these conflicts have transformed the former Haven into Babel, with the inhabitants unable to speak to each other in any common language besides physical and psychological violence. A convent headed by the mysterious and magical Consolata on Ruby’s outskirts serves as its only haven and true communal center, although this role can never be acknowledged: the convent’s occupants are women, after all, and Ruby’s elder men cannot allow such a site to exist unmolested. Ultimately, the town’s factions must confront their own tensions or be destroyed. As the third book in the trilogy begun by Beloved, Paradise offers a cautionary tale regarding any and all utopias: they can never last.

Love (2003) is set in the seaside resort town of Silk, Florida, where middle- and upper-class African Americans go to vacation. The resort’s main hotel was once run by the late, ingenious Bill “Papa” Cosey, who had many affairs with women who visited his hotel. The various facets of Cosey’s personality that these women and his family witnessed form the plot and structure. The people who knew Cosey find that they saw remarkably different facets of his character, leading them to ponder the extent to which one charismatic man had affected their lives and friendships. This leads to the novel’s multivalent lesson about the imprecision, frustration, mystery, and beauty of love.

Since Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, critics have scrutinized her work as never before, often with an unforgiving eye. Neither Paradise nor Love earned the initial praise that Morrison’s earlier works had. Nevertheless, both sold tremendously well, and Paradise has begun to find acceptance in the academy, notably more quickly than Tar Baby did.

The student of Toni Morrison’s fiction has nothing less than an embarrassment of riches at her or his fingertips. Critical studies of Morrison’s fiction, ranging from journal articles to theses, dissertations, essay collections, book chapters, and monographs, have appeared steadily since Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1978. The number of studies, as well as the rate at which they have appeared, have been increasing at a geometric rate since Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and the awarding of the Nobel Prize in 1993 turned this stream into a flood. As of the late 1990s, an article touching upon some portion or other of Morrison’s oeuvre appeared somewhere every month. As of late 2004, more than 48 monographs, 475 dissertations, 10 essay collections, and 550 journal articles focusing upon Morrison’s essays, short stories, and novels have been published. Many of these discuss Morrison’s writings in tandem with her contemporaries in African American or postmodern fiction, including Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarence Major, Charles Johnson, Ishmael Reed, and countless others. Even more numerous are the materials that make mention of Morrison at some point in their pages but that do not devote entire chapters to her. In short, again, a Morrison aficionado will never lack resources, although some of Morrison’s novels have attracted more attention than others.

Inasmuch as it earned Morrison the Pulitzer Prize and was arguably the catalyst for her being awarded the Nobel Prize, Beloved is easily the most popular work among Morrison’s critics, followed by Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye. This is not to say that a dearth of material exists for Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Paradise, and Love; on the contrary, each has dozens of articles and book chapters devoted to it, with Paradise and Love possessing the least only because they are Morrison’s most recent novels and therefore are still making an impression on Morrison’s critics. In fact, the budding Morrison scholar would generally be well advised to seek out the essay collections and surveys of Morrison’s fiction devoted almost entirely to her. It is nearly impossible to develop an appreciation of Morrison’s craft without placing it within historical contexts, and very few of these studies divorce her from the history surrounding either the author or her characters.

It is worth noting that Morrison has expressed her desire for students of her work to focus more on her texts than on critical studies of them.^* Indeed, Morrison can be a highly challenging read best enjoyed by many rereadings. Her dismay notwithstanding, though, Morrison is also well served by many of her most sympathetic critics, who tend to explicate their subject well, albeit with a great deal of duplication. This is to be expected, of course: scholars of major authors almost inevitably follow the tracks of their predecessors, and Morrison scholars are not excepted from this rule.

Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion (1998), offers essential synopses of Morrison’s life, literary contexts, and the thematic issues that tend to concern the majority of Morrison’s critics and admirers in all of Morrison’s novels to date; it is one of the best introductions to Morrison’s work. In addition, Nellie Y. McKay, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (1988) is exemplary but obviously outdated for those interested in Morrison’s later works. More up to date is David L. Middleton, Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism (1997), which collects solid representative essays on every novel up to Jazz. His earlier Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography (1987) is out of date but still a valuable resource. Better, perhaps, is Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah’s. eds., Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993). Gloria G. Roberson, The World of Toni Morrison: A Guide to Characters and Places in Her Novels (2003) is an invaluable glossary to the Morrison oeuvre.

Other helpful volumes include Carl Plasa, ed., Toni Morrison: Beloved (1998); Naomi R. Rand, Silko, Morrison, and Roth: Studies in Survival (1999); Patricia McKee, Producing American Races: Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison (1999); Marc C. Conner, ed., The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable (2000).

To date, several hundred articles on Morrison have appeared in refereed scholarly journals alone. Most articles discuss one or two of Morrison’s novels; others trace a particular thematic problem through all of Morrison’s fiction; still others discuss Morrison in comparison with several different authors. Some of the most prominent journal articles on Morrison in general include: Mary Paniccia Carden, “Models of Memory and Romance: The Dual Endings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Twentieth Century Literature 45, no. 4 (Winter 1999); Michael Nowlin, “Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the Racial Dreams of the American Writer,” American Literature 71, no. 1 (March 1999); Kimberly Chabot Davis, “‘Postmodern Blackness’: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the End of History,” Twentieth Century Literature 44, no. 2 (Summer 1998); Harold T. Shapiro, Robert Fagles, Nell Irvin Painter, Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Russell Banks, and Arnold Rampersand, “Nobelist Professor Toni Morrison: An Academic Celebration,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 2 (Winter 1993–1994); Timothy B. Powell, “Toni Morrison: The Struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page,” BALF 24, no. 4 (Winter 1990); Nancy Jesser, “Violence, Home, and Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” AAR 33, no. 2 (Summer 1999); Malin Walther Pereira, “Periodizing Toni Morrison’s Work from The Bluest Eye to Jazz: The Importance of Tar Baby,” MELUS 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1997); Jane S. Bakerman, “Failures of Love: Female Initiation in the Novels of Toni Morrison,” American Literature 52, no. 4 (January 1981); Carolyn M. Jones, “Traces and Cracks: Identity and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Jazz” AAR 31, no. 3 (Autumn 1997); Lynda Koolish, “Fictive Strategies and Cinematic Representations in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Postcolonial Theory/Postcolonial Text,” AAR 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1995); Cecil Brown, “Interview with Toni Morrison,” The Massachusetts Review 36 (1995).

Mowry, Jess (b. March 27, 1960, near Starkville, Mississippi) Jess Mowry is best known for his fictional portrayal of the struggles of inner-city youth, particularly in the difficult conditions that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. His stories and novels consciously attempt to remain current with the realities of the youths he depicts and to be as true to his subjects as possible; most are based upon the lives of youths Mowry counsels in Oakland, California. Each work also shares a number of common themes: American society is almost completely indifferent to the lives of young African Americans, particularly males, in its inner cities; these same young people are forced to work so hard for survival that it is nearly impossible to see a way out of the maze of guns, drugs, and gangs; the most viable way out is the redemptive power of love and friendship.

Mowry’s first book, Rats in the Trees (1990), is a collection of stories about Robby, a young African American boy who travels from Fresno, California, to West Oakland and is almost immediately recruited into a gang, the Animals. The gang members’ exploits and confrontations with a rival gang form the crux of the plot, but they also provide a stage for many ruminations upon the world and its corruptions as Robby and the other gang members see them. Mowry’s first novel, Children of the Night (1991) is the story of Ryo, a thirteen-year-old black youth living in West Oakland. Ryo’s mother, Tracy, gives him a great deal of love and affection to help protect him from the temptations of the streets, but her efforts are compromised by the distractions of her jobs. Ryo begins working for a local drug dealer to provide funds for his mother and himself but soon finds the work horrifying. He later destroys the dealer and joins with others in the community who help show him how to think and work affirmatively towards a more stable future. Although Children of the Night is still in print, its distribution by the small publisher Holloway House makes it somewhat difficult to find.

Way Past Cool (1992) is again set in West Oakland and concerns the lives of street gang members. Two rival gangs, the Friends and the Crew, find themselves manipulated into a gang war by Deek, a local drug dealer vying for their turf until they discover his machinations. They then join forces to hunt down and trap Deek, leading to even greater violence. Mowry paints a portrait of bleakness for his subjects, mitigated only by the redemptive power of love and friendship, even as he refuses to dismiss their lives and lifestyles. Way Past Cool also attracted attention upon its publication due to Mowry’s refusal to sell the lucrative film rights—and therefore creative control—at the height of the “gangsta” trend in rap music and film.

Six Out Seven (1994) has the same setting as Mowry’s previous works, focusing on thirteen-year-old Mississippian émigré Corbitt Wainwright, who befriends local resident Lactameon upon his arrival in Oakland. The two boys start to investigate the origins of the conditions in which Oakland’s black residents, to say nothing of other African American communities beset by the destruction of the trade in guns and drugs. It is Mowry’s strongest indictment of white Americans’ indifference to African Americans in the inner cities and also alleges that more powerful forces in the United States government and elsewhere fuel these plagues.

Ghost Train (1996) is juvenile fiction set in World War II Oakland. Two teens, Haitian immigrant Remi DuMont and his friend Niya discover a ghost train haunting the city’s streets in the wake of a murder Remi witnesses. The novel is equally concerned with suspense as with showing how the two friends from different cultural backgrounds can learn to work together. Babylon Boyz (1999) may also be considered juvenile fiction, although it covers much of the same territory as the earlier, more adult novels. It concerns three young West Oakland teens, Dante, Pook, and Wyatt, who discover a cache of pure cocaine that could be their ticket out of poverty, but they find that trying to sell the drugs is more trouble than they had anticipated.

Mosley, Walter (b. January 12, 1952, Los Angeles) Walter’s Mosley is the best-selling author of numerous celebrated detective novels and science (or speculative) fiction. He is also quite prolific, with nearly twenty books to his credit as of 2004, including thirteen novels, three short-story collections, and two books of social criticism. Although he has won acclaim for most of his efforts, Mosley is best known as a mystery author. His initial series of detective novels are easily his most famous, largely due to their clever yet vulnerable and sympathetic protagonist, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. Via Rawlins, Mosley created a body of detective fiction that carved out its own distinctive niche while consciously working in the tradition of African American detective established by Harlem Renaissance author Rudolph Fisher with The Conjure-Man Dies (1932) and continued by Chester Himes (1909–1984), whose death left a significant gap that Mosley has seamlessly filled. Himes’s novels, featuring “Gravedigger” Jones and “Coffin” Ed Johnson, were at once excellent entries in the detective tradition, influential commentaries upon the state of African America, and commercially successful. Coincidentally, both authors also wrote novels set in 1940s Los Angeles, although those of Himes were not in the detective genre.

Beginning with Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), Mosley revived and continued to generate massive interest in African American detective fiction. Devil introduces “Easy” Rawlins, a southerner and veteran of World War II who establishes roots in South Central Los Angeles, only to find himself drawn against his will into investigating the disappearance of a politician’s fiancée, all while dodging the harassment and threats of the Los Angeles Police Department and the city’s underworld. The novel also introduces Easy’s childhood friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, who functions as both his foil and as a decidedly violent doppelgänger. The duo’s misadventures in this and subsequent entries in the series are marked by a few notable differences from the conventional detective genre and unusual elements that have endeared him to a wide audience. First, Rawlins is obviously intelligent and street-smart but not the nearly superhuman genius frequently found in mystery novels. Second, he is a highly reluctant, if ultimately successful detective, almost invariably forced to investigate various crimes against his better judgment. Third, throughout his exploits, Rawlins frequently and unabashedly offers insight into mid-twentieth-century African Americans’ lives, especially in and around Los Angeles. The latter element allows Mosley’s readers to see the extent to which both the Great Migration of African Americans from the South in the early to mid-twentieth century and wartime politics affected the economic and social situation of African Americans in southern California, while also musing on definitions of race, miscegenation, and intraracial conflicts. Devil in a Blue Dress was also made into a popular film in 1995.

Mosley’s next few novels continue Easy Rawlins’s saga in chronological order, part of the author’s long-term plan to document the stages of his popular hero’s life. Each stage is thoroughly based in historical realities, allowing Mosley to provide simultaneously a document of the changes that transformed his native Los Angeles in the latter half of the twentieth century. Perhaps equally important, Easy Rawlins also gains and occasionally loses more of the real estate he believes can save his cherished adopted community. In A Red Death (1991), Easy Rawlins and Mouse find themselves investigating the congregation of a black church in 1953 Los Angeles and later being threatened with murder charges themselves. In White Butterfly (1992), Los Angeles detectives press the now-married father Rawlins of 1956 into investigating the murder of a white female college student turned exotic dancer, despite the fact that the police have simultaneously ignored the rapes and murders of young African American women. Black Betty (1994) takes place in 1961, a transitional time for black Los Angeles, as urban decay began to erode some of the community’s stability, which eventually led to the Watts uprising of 1965. Rawlins is recruited to find Black Betty, an African American housekeeper with whom he’d been stricken many years earlier, providing the novel with an opportunity to explore the many class and racial divisions among Angelenos. A Little Yellow Dog (1996) finds Rawlins working as a high school janitor in 1963, trying to leave behind the intense adventures stemming from his close connection to the streets, a goal that the heretofore extremely violent Mouse shares, at least initially. When he is asked to care for a small dog owned by one of the school’s teachers (who also becomes a short-lived paramour), Easy soon finds himself involved in local gang and drug warfare. Gone Fishin’ (1997) is a prequel to the other books of the series, tracking the early days of Easy and Mouse’s friendship in Houston, Texas, in 1939, when the hero was but nineteen years old. A seventh installment in the Rawlins series, Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002), follows A Little Yellow Dog chronologically in 1964, when racial tensions and talk of revolution in black Los Angeles began to rise precipitously. Finally, a collection of Easy Rawlins short stories, Six Easy Pieces: Easy Rawlins Stories (2003) was culled from earlier reprints of the original novels in the series.

Although Easy Rawlins is inarguably Mosley’s most popular character, he has also written mysteries with different protagonists, science fiction novels, and dramatic narratives that transcend categorization. RL’s Dream (1995) falls into the latter group; it introduces Atwater “Soupspoon” Wise, an elderly, southern African American blues musician who has fallen down on his luck on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. When Soupspoon is evicted from his apartment, another Southerner, Kiki Waters, a white woman suffering from years of sexual abuse, helps him get back on his feet. They initiate a complex, symbiotic friendship that allows each to confront the trauma of her or his respective past, without easy solutions or platitudes. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998) is a short-story collection revolving around street philosopher Socrates Fortlow, a former convict and resident of Watts, who unpacks the complexities of personal and moral issues he encounters in his struggle to create a post-prison life. Each story poses a thorny philosophical problem that Fortlow must attempt to apply to a community and world that is being consumed by nihilistic violence. Mosley also developed selections from Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned into a teleplay produced and aired in 1998. Socrates Fortlow reappears as the protagonist of Walkin’ the Dog (2000), an equally sophisticated meditation on the frequently blurred lines between good and evil, love and hate, freedom and enslavement, and other dichotomies. Fortlow attempts to resist the torments and temptations of his past as he continues his struggle for a new life and a new view of his past and possible future.

With Blue Light (1999), Mosley ventured into science fiction for the first time, garnering the sort of attention, if not the praise, that is normally accorded to Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany. Mosley also introduced his audience to another strong mystery series with Fearless Jones (2001) and Fear Itself (2003). The former’s eponymous character is the foil of the true protagonist, Paris Minton, a shrewdly intellectual African American bookstore owner in Watts.

Mumbo Jumbo (1972) Ishmael Reed’s third novel is arguably his masterwork, the one with which he is most easily identifiable and which best represents his creative powers. It is a satire upon the Western world and the concomitant aesthetics that denigrate the history, culture, literature, and lives of people of color. Most pointedly, it satirizes strictures, whether well meaning or not, that white and black critics place upon African Americans’ creativity. The narrative’s central metaphor is Jes Grew (the name is taken from several sources, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and African American folklore), a pandemic that causes those infected to begin dancing and acting creatively against their will and cultural upbringing. The disease, it is later revealed, originated in Africa, passed through New Orleans (traditionally considered the birthplace of jazz), and was carried by people of African descent to all other points in the United States.

Jes Grew has several meanings: jazz and blues music, which played essential roles in transforming American culture in the twentieth century, especially during the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the “Jazz Age”; artistic freedom; the migration of African Americans that began in the early twentieth century; vibrant multiculturalism; and polytheistic, syncretic non-Western cultures of the world. The plot centers around protagonist and “HooDoo Detective” Papa LaBas (whose name comes from a vodun, or voodoo/voudou/hoodoo loa, or deity), who is trying to determine, first, why Jes Grew has arisen and, second, where it is headed. LaBas later discovers that Jes Grew is seeking its “text,” the completed “Book of Thoth” (written by the ancient Egyptian god Osiris), which contains the land’s syncopated dance moves and therefore the people’s creativity. After the book was stolen from ancient Egypt, representatives of the ancient order of the Knights Templar divided it into fourteen pieces to prevent Jes Grew from having a focal point. Once Jes Grew finds its text, the millennia-long domination of monotheism and its concomitant monoculturalism will end.

Reed aims his satirical barbs at the sacred figures and ideas of Western cultures to force the reader to question their hegemony. In the process, he satirizes Christianity, Freemasonry, American Ivy League schools (the “Wallflower Order”), and Islam, showing how each is a form of or allied with monoculturalism and imperialism. In each case, these institutions and their official histories construct romantic narratives that elide any information that contradicts them in much the same way that Western societies have cast different peoples as Others to be marginalized or destroyed for the sake of expediency and greed. They also are what contribute to an American misreading of its history that sycophantically reveres Europe as the locus of “civilization,” despite that region’s overwhelming debt to non-Western cultures. The result is an America that hardly resembles its official history, which places white, European Americans at the center. Reed highlights this monoculturalism by making it part of the text’s iconography; the number “1” is substituted for the word one to show how an obsession with individual desires is the organizing principle of the West and of American society. Mumbo Jumbo calls for a continuous redefinition of “American” culture as a multicultural nation. It also argues against the more authoritarian views within the Black Arts Movement, as Reed points out in an interview in which he alleges that “there was a nonaggression pact signed between the traditional liberal critics and the black aesthetic critics. They were brought into the publishing companies about the same time that I was, about the same time that Doubleday … didn’t renew my contract and this was about a week after I had been nominated for two National Book Awards, and then later I learned how these black aesthetic people had gone on … and I wasn’t the only victim.^* Mumbo Jumbo therefore represents the conflict between the “black aesthetic people”—representatives of one type of monocultural thinking—and other writers through a particular exchange between poet Major Young, Woodrow Wilson Jefferson and his patron, Hinckle Von Vampton. Jefferson not only serves as Von Vampton’s personal servant; he is also the “Negro Viewpoint” for Von Vampton’s paper, the “Benign Monster,” a position which is designed to groom Jefferson for the role of the “Talking Android,” one of the weapons against Jes Grew. When Jefferson misunderstands a bit of black vernacular, Von Vampton chides him to “Get with it, Jackson, maybe it will enliven your articles a bit. You still haven’t made a transition from that Marxist rhetoric to the Jazz prose we want” (100). In this particular chastisement, Reed offers a somewhat thinly veiled attack on the ideology and rhetoric of some black aestheticians, specifically Amiri Baraka, whose work commonly followed the form of jazz then began to follow “Marxist [/Maoist] blueprints” (Martin, “Interview” 177).^*

With the possible exception of Flight to Canada (1976), Mumbo Jumbo is Reed’s most frequently studied work, with at least a dozen articles studying the novel directly or mentioning it in brief since its initial publication. Most scholarship, however, emerged in the 1990s; in the ultimate chapter of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (1987), Henry Louis Gates Jr. offers a detailed analysis of Mumbo Jumbo that helped revive interest in Reed’s work in the academy. Some of the most significant articles include Reginald Martin, “The Free-Lance Pallbearer Confronts the Terrible Threes: Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics,” MELUS 14, no. 2 (Summer 1987); Sharon A. Jesse, “Laughter and Identity in Mumbo Jumbo” MELUS 21, no. 4 (Winter 1996); Neil Schmitz, “Neo-HooDoo: The Experimental Fiction of Ishmael Reed,” Twentieth Century Literature 20, no. 2 (April 1974); Sami Ludwig, “Ishmael Reed’s Inductive Narratology of Detection,” AAR 32, no. 3 (Autumn 1998); and Joe Weixlmann, “African American Deconstruction of the Novel in the Work of Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major,” MELUS 17, no. 4 (Winter 1991–1992). Bruce Dick, The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed (1999), also collects a number of new and previously published essays, chapters, and articles on all of Reed’s work, with significant attention given to Mumbo Jumbo.

Murray, Albert (b. 12 May, 1916, Nokomis, Alabama) Albert Murray is perhaps equally known as a novelist and a critic, although he has been considerably more prolific in the latter occupation. From the late 1940s until the present, Murray has written extensively and published essays on a wide variety of social and political issues, particularly concerning African Americans’ ultimately American identities and the wealth that jazz has contributed to American culture. Murray has repeatedly and consistently asserted that most of what Americans of all backgrounds tell themselves about “race” is a harmful myth, which has meant that Murray has frequently run afoul of prevailing critical trends. He has eschewed in himself and opposed in others artificial and arbitrary limits on artistic boundaries. Murray greatly admires the genius of such jazz artists as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker as much as the literary innovations and mythological aspirations of Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and other modernists. Murray takes from all of these influences metaphors and symbols indicating the power of mythologies and referentiality, but it is from jazz that he derives arguably his greatest inspiration and the rubric for his own writing, regardless of genre.

It was not until the 1970s, however, that Murray began publishing his fiction, although he began the trilogy comprising Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991) and The Seven League Boots (1996) in the mid-1940s. In all three installments, Murray evinces his determination to incorporate the rhythms and dynamics of blues and jazz performances into fiction with his late contemporary, correspondent, and good friend Ralph Ellison. The first novel, Train Whistle Guitar, was instantly hailed as a modern classic; it is easily also Murray’s highest and best-known achievement. It begins the saga of Scooter, born and raised in the American South, on an epic quest to appreciate simultaneously the importance of the individual’s identity and personal freedom, on the one hand, and the individual’s necessary reliance upon communal dynamics and improvisation for survival and success, on the other. Those dynamics are themselves a metaphor derived from jazz music, in which collective improvisation and imaginative individual soloing—at least since the innovations of trumpeter and cornetist Louis Armstrong in the 1920s—are the genre’s sine qua non. The novel possesses a rich lyricism as well that is meant to emulate the cadences and syncopation of jazz and the blues. For Murray, freedom may be found within these forms of music, as they allow the performer and listener to transcend their present conditions by operating outside of the strict boundaries found in more traditional musical forms. In simpler terms, Scooter must find a way of balancing both official and homespun accounts of local and national history and then reconciling both to the experiences gained via adventures in an extraordinarily complex South.

While Train Whistle Guitar is primarily concerned with Scooter’s childhood, adolescence, and teenage years, the second and third installments of the saga, The Spyglass Tree (1991) and The Seven League Boots (1996), cover his college years and a postmatriculation career as a jazz bassist, respectively.

Murray’s thoughts on political and social issues have been collected in quite a few volumes, each of which mixes memoirs, essays, and music criticism in an enticing mix. They are, moreover, helpful counterparts to the novels’ frequently rich yet dense investigations of history, culture, music, and ideology. The best of these may be The Omni-Americans (1970), Murray’s first book, which argues against the notion that African Americans are marginalized or pathological Others, as portrayed in much of the literature written by or about them, especially in sociological texts. Murray argues instead that African Americans are indeed the exemplars of American identity. Stomping the Blues (1976), which focuses upon jazz aesthetics, underscores Murray’s stylistic influences and concerns, while The Blue Devils of NADA (1996) is largely a manifesto against artistic chaos.

Scholarship on Murray’s fiction is extensive, including many book chapters and journal articles that frequently compare him to other popular authors of the era. Notable books include: Murray’s autobiography, South to a Very Old Place (1971); Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000), edited by Murray and John F. Callahan; Roberta S. Maguire, ed., Conversations with Albert Murray (1997); Lynda Koolish, African American Writers, Portraits and Visions (2001). Journal articles include: Warren Carson, “Albert Murray: Literary Reconstruction of the Vernacular Community,” AAR 27, no. 2 (Summer 1993); Charles H. Rowell, “‘An All-Purpose, All-American Literary Intellectual’: An Interview with Albert Murray,” Callaloo 20, no. 2 (Spring 1997); Albert Murray, “Regional Particulars and Universal Statement in Southern Writing,” Callaloo 38 (Winter 1989).

Myers, Walter Dean (a.k.a. Walter M. Myers; b. 1937, New York, New York) Novelist, poet, and editor Walter Dean Myers is best known for his prodigious catalogue of juvenile fiction and nonfiction published from the 1960s until the present. To date, he has published over sixty books, including thirty-seven works of fiction. A former affiliate of the Harlem Writers’ Workshop, Myers writes about a diverse set of subjects in African American history and culture, often setting his works within a distinct historical context. A substantial number of his fictional books, however, are set in Harlem, where Myers grew to adulthood. His works in that setting tend to focus upon the richness of life in Harlem, rather than the images of pathology that sociologists and the mass media normally apply to that community.

Myers has won virtually every major award for young people’s fiction available for the following titles:

Somewhere in the Darkness (1992): the Boston Globe/Horn Book (1992), Booklist Editors’ Choice (1992), Newbery Honor Book (1993), ALA Best Books for Young Adults (1993), and Coretta Scott King (1993) Awards

The Righteous Revenge of Artemis Bonner (1992): ALA Best Books for Young Adults Award (1993)

The Mouse Rap (1990): IRA Children’s Choice, (1991)

Scorpions (1988): ALA Notable Book Citation (1988) and Newbery Honor Book (1989)

Fallen Angels (1988): ALA Best Books for Young Adults, Coretta Scott King, and Parents’ Choice Awards (all 1988)

Motown and Didi: A Love Story (1987): Coretta Scott King Award for Fiction (1985)

The Outside Shot (1984): Parents’ Choice Award (1984)

Hoops (1981): Edgar Allen Pie Award Runner-up (1982) and ALA Best Books for Young Adults Citation (1982)

The Legend of Tarik (1981): ALA Best Books for Young Adults Citation (1981) and Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, National Council for Social Studies and the Children’s Book Council (1982)

The Young Landlords (1979): ALA Notable Book and Best Books for Young Adults Citations (1979) and Coretta Scott King Award for Fiction (1980)

It Ain’t All for Nothin’ (1978): ALA Notable Book and Best Books for Young Adults Citations (1978)

Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff (1975): ALA Notable Book (1975)

The Dancers (1972): Child Study Association of America’s Children’s Book of the Year (1972)

Where Does the Day Go? (1969): Council on Interracial Books for Children Award (1969)

Myers’s other fictional works include: Fly, Jimmy, Fly! (1974); Brainstorm (1977; science fiction); Mojo and the Russians (1977); Victory for Jamie (1977); The Black Pearl and the Ghost; or, One Mystery After Another (1980; juvenile adventure/mystery); The Golden Serpent (1980; juvenile adventure/ mystery); The Nicholas Factor (1983); Tales of a Dead King (1983); Mr. Monkey and the Gotcha Bird (1984); Sweet Illusions (1986); Crystal (1987); Me, Mop, and the Moondance Kid (1988); Mop, Moondance, and the Nagasaki Knights (1992); Darnell Rock Reporting (1994); The Glory Field (1994); The Dragon Takes a Wife (1995); Shadow of the Red Moon (1995); The Story of the Three Kingdoms (1995); How Mr. Monkey Saw the Whole World (1996); Slam! (1996); Smiffy Blue: Ace Crime Detective: The Case of the Missing Ruby and Other Stories (1996); Monster (1999); 145th Street: Short Stories (2000).

As a major author of young people’s fiction, Myers has also received considerable scholarly attention. Relevant books include Myers’s own Bad Boy: A Memoir (2001) and Rudine Sims Bishop, Presenting Walter Dean Myers (1991). Related articles include: Violet J. Harris, “African American Children’s Literature: The First One Hundred Years,” The Journal of Negro Education 59, no. 4 (Autumn 1990); R. D. Lane, “‘Keepin’ it Real’: Walter Dean Myers and the Promise of African-American Children’s Literature,” and Elizabeth Schafer, “‘I’m Gonna Glory in Learnin’: Academic Aspirations of African American Characters in Children’s Literature,” and Nina Mikkelsen, “Insiders, Outsiders, and the Question of Authenticity: Who Shall Write for African American Children?” in AAR 32, no. 1 (Spring 1998). That entire issue of African American Review, in fact, is devoted to young people’s fiction, including Myers’s work.

* John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, “The MacArthur Fellows Program,” http://www.macfound.org/programs/fel/fel_overview.htm.

* Christopher Funkhouser, “An Interview with Nathaniel Mackey,” Callaloo 18, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 321.

* Funkouser, “An Interview with Nathaniel Mackey,” 330.

* Bernard W. Bell, “Introduction: Clarence Major’s Transgressive Voice and Double Consciousness as an African American Postmodernist Artist,” in Clarence Major and His Art, ed. Bernard W. Bell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 1.

* Larry McCaffery and Jerzy Kutznik,“‘I Follow My Eyes’: An Interview with Clarence Major,” in Clarence Major and His Art, ed. Bernard W. Bell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 88.

* Jerome Klinkowitz, “Clarence Major’s Innovative Fiction,” in Clarence Major and His Art, ed. Bernard W. Bell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 151.

* Lisa C. Roney, “The Double Vision of Clarence Major, Painter and Writer,” African American Review 28, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 67.

* Deborah Fairman Browning, review for Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, by Clarence Major, MELUS 16, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 133–36.

* Keith Bernard Mitchell, “Paule Marshall,” in The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), 274.

* Charles Johnson, “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction,” Callaloo 22 (Autumn 1984), 6.

* Elliott Butler-Evans, Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 59.

* Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 164; italics in the original.

* Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

* Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 10–11.

* Reginald Martin, “An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 4, no. 2 (1984): 177.

* Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies 106 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987), describes Baraka’s jazz-inspired poetry as follows: “it is not the movement of, for example, Jack Kerouac’s “bop prosody,” which is as breathless and unpunctuated as the road itself; rather, it is an urban prose of jerky rhythms, full of starts and stops. It emphasizes the phrase, staccato notes…. I would analogize … Jones’s [typewriter] to Lester Young’s saxophone” (16).