The Homewood Books

By John Edgar Wideman

1985

First Published

4.20

Average Rating

647

Number of Pages

19H45M

Audio Length

Edgar Wideman’s The Homewood Books is so named because they share characters, events, and locales, these two novels—Hiding Place and Sent for You Yesterday—and one collection of short stories—Damballa h—are set in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, where Wideman was raised. As Wideman writes in his introduction to this edition, the three books “offer a continuous investigation, from many angles, not so much of a physical location, Homewood, . . . but of a culture, a way of seeing and being seen.” Three voices and three perspectives dominate the story narrated in Hiding Place : Bess, who has lost a son to the war, living a hermetic existence of Bruston Hill; tommy, who is fleeing the police for a murder charge he is not guilty of; and Clement, a simple boy who makes deliveries to Bess’s house. Damballah is a powerful collection of interrelated stories spanning a century in Homewood. The tales celebrate a community of people who, in the face of crisis, need, and fear, uphold each other through grace, courage, and dignity. Winner of the 1984 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and named as one of the fifteen best books of 1983 by the New York Times Book Review, Sent for You Yesterday traces, through its narrator, Doot, the intertwining lives through time of the inhabitants of Homewood—Lucy, Brother Tate, Albert Wilkes, Carl French, and their ancestors and offspring—- from the blues-oriented 1920s to the drug-influenced 1970s.

Avg Rating

4.20

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

53%

4 STARS

27%

3 STARS

11%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

John Edgar Wideman

Author · 25 books

A widely-celebrated writer and the winner of many literary awards, he is the first to win the International PEN/Faulkner Award twice: in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. In 2000 he won the O. Henry Award for his short story "Weight", published in The Callaloo Journal. In March, 2010, he self-published "Briefs," a new collection of microstories, on Lulu.com. Stories from the book have already been selected for the O Henry Prize for 2010 and the Best African-American Fiction 2010 award. His nonfiction book Brothers and Keepers received a National Book Award. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and much of his writing is set there, especially in the Homewood neighborhood of the East End. He graduated from Pittsburgh's Peabody High School, then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League forward on the basketball team. He was the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship (New College, Oxford University, England), graduating in 1966. He also graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Critics Circle nomination, and his memoir Fatheralong was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. Wideman was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1998, for outstanding achievement in that genre. In 1997, his novel The Cattle Killing won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction. He has taught at the University of Wyoming, University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and chaired the African American Studies Department, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. He currently teaches at Brown University, and he sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.