John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman (born June 14, 1941, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an American writer regarded for his lyrical, intricate literary style in novels about the experiences of African American men in contemporary urban America. Many of Wideman’s novels bend the confines of the fiction genre, incorporating elements of autobiography and nonfiction. He was the first author to twice receive the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, for the novels Sent for You Yesterday (1983) and Philadelphia Fire (1990).

Background and education

Until the age of 12, Wideman lived in Homewood, a working-class African American section of Pittsburgh, which later became the setting of many of his novels. An outstanding scholar and athlete at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1963), he was the subject of a profile in Look magazine titled “The Astonishing John Wideman” while still a college student and became the second African American to receive a Rhodes scholarship to the University of Oxford (B.Ph., 1966).

Books and teaching career

Wideman joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1966, and the following year he published his first novel, A Glance Away, about a day in the lives of a reformed drug user and a homosexual English professor. His second novel, Hurry Home (1970), is the story of an intellectual alienated from his Black ancestry and the Black community. After serving as director of the university’s Afro-American studies program from 1971 to 1973, Wideman published The Lynchers (1973), his first novel to focus on interracial issues.

Wideman left Pennsylvania to become a professor at the University of Wyoming (1975–85). His next work, the so-called Homewood Trilogy, is an historical exploration of family and community. Comprising two novels, Hiding Place (1981) and Sent for You Yesterday, and a collection of short stories, Damballah (1981), the trilogy also examines the impact of slavery on African Americans. The three works received praise from many critics, and Sent for You Yesterday was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In Brothers and Keepers (1984), Wideman’s first nonfiction book, he contemplates the role of the Black intellectual by studying his relationship with his brother, who was serving a life sentence in prison.

Wideman subsequently taught at the University of Massachusetts and at Brown University, retiring from the latter university in 2014. In 1991, after the publication of Philadelphia Fire, a novel that looks at the Black liberation organization MOVE and reflects on Wideman’s son, who was incarcerated for 30 years for a murder he committed as a teenager, Wideman received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for the second time.

Wideman’s short-story collections include Fever (1989), The Stories of John Edgar Wideman (1992), American Histories (2018), and You Made Me Love You: Selected Stories, 1981–2018 (2021). Among his other works are the memoirs Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (1994; a finalist for a National Book Award) and Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race, and Love (2001) as well as the novels The Cattle Killing (1996; winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for best historical fiction) and Fanon (2008).

In 2016 Wideman published Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, a biography of the father of Emmett Till, a Black teenager whose murder in 1955 catalyzed the emerging civil rights movement. The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction. Slaveroad (2024) explores the title term and the experience of African Americans through a series of interrelated essays that blend memoir, history, and biography.

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Honors

Wideman’s many honors include the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature (1986), a MacArthur Fellowship (1993), the O. Henry Prize (2000), the Langston Hughes Medal (2004), and a Lannan literary fellowship for lifetime achievement (2018).