Black Surrealist

The first critical biography of pioneering African-American writer Ted Joans.

Black Surrealist is the product of prodigious research. It offers 60 pages of footnotes, a 15-page bibliography, an extensive index ... plenty more. The dozens of illustrations, photographs and pictures of archival material provide a context for Joans’ wild life and untamed art ... The folks at Bloomsbury are certainly to be applauded for putting together an extraordinary book.

Whether Belletto’s biography triggers future interest from publishes in Joans’s extant writing, it should advance our consideration of him as an avant-garde artist, and justifiably so. Regardless, without doubt he admirably lived his life as art. Finally, Belletto takes care to note that Blackness was front and center in Joans’s work. Black experience as attitude and outlook encompassed all he pursued: jazz, painting, poetry, sex, and global travel.

Black Surrealist is pure light illuminating the long night of blues and beats, humor and hunger, freedom and flight, myth and memory, love and sex, art and improvisation that is the poetic life of Ted Joans. Steven Belletto plumbed the Marvelous and produced a magnificent tapestry depicting not only Joans’s surrealist world but surrealism’s Black world. Ted Lives! Dig?

Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans is a fascinating and unconventional biography for an even more fascinating and unconventional artist. Expansive and thoroughly researched, this book will be a revelation for those of us who have known Joans primarily through his more widely available poetry collections and his most anthologized poems. Belletto may at times fall under the spell of his subject, but he nonetheless paints an engaging portrait in which we see Joans–the man of strong passions, politics, and contradictions, as well as the enigmatic, charismatic creator–with new clarity.

Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans is a sorely needed critical biography of a poet and artist who made a profound impact on experimental movements on both sides of the Atlantic, from surrealism to the Black Arts Movement. Belletto’s eminently readable biography deftly situates Joans in the artistic, political, and literary contexts in which he lived, traversing the three continents and eight decades of Joans’s life. This study is especially well attuned to the plasticity of 'facts' in Joans’s life, brilliantly illuminating the relentless work of critical fabulation through which Joans fashioned his life and art alike.

One of the most significant books of Beat scholarship in recent years; Belletto’s achievement in this biography will enlighten every serious reader of Beat literature.

Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College, USA. He is author of The Beats: A Literary History (2020) and No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012). He is the editor of four books, including American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (2018) and The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017). He is the Editor of Contemporary Literature .