The Man Who Cried I Am
John A. Williams
The Man Who Cried I Am
John A. Williams
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Description
Rediscover the sensational 1967 literary thriller that captures the bitter struggles of postwar Black intellectuals and artists, with a foreword by Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America’s racial fault lines.
‘Sixty years after it was first published, this shocking novel takes us on an astonishing black global journey that is historical but feels totally alive, energized and contemporary.’
— Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other
‘[A]n idiosyncratic, rancorous compound of roman à clef, sociocultural history, bildungsroman, and international thriller complete with an apocalyptic ending that patched disquietingly into our worst nightmares of what white America ultimately had in mind for us. Imagine a chronicle with the sweep, breadth, and momentum of Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions morphing plausibly into one of Eric Ambler’s darker and more acerbic spy melodramas. Only with Black people – sad, mad, and fiercely articulate – in the foreground.’
— Gene Seymour, Bookforum
‘It is a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb.... This is a book white people are not ready to read yet; neither are most black people.... But [it] is the milestone produced since Native Son. Besides which, and where I should begin, it is a damn beautifully written book.’
— Chester Himes, author of Rage in Harlem
‘Magnificent ... obviously in the Baldwin and Ellison class.’
— John Fowles, author of The Magus
‘If The Man Who Cried I Am were a painting it would be done by Brueghel or Bosch. The madness and the dance is never-ending display of humanity trying to creep past inevitable Fate.’
— Walter Mosley, author of Devil in a Blue Dress
John Alfred Williams (1925–2015) published over twenty books in his lifetime, fiction and non-fiction, including The Angry Ones (1960), The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), The Most Native of Sons: A Biography of Richard Wright (1970), Captain Blackman (1972), and !Click Song (1982). He was the Paul Robeson Professor of English at Rutgers University and won the American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2011.
Ishmael Reed is the author of more than twenty-five books, including Mumbo Jumbo, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, and most recently The Man Who Haunted Himself.
Merve Emre is director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at the New Yorker.