away from physics and into an English major. The
summer after his junior year, he went to Oxford
University to study British literature. He graduated
with a B.A. in English and a minor in physics in
December 1985.
The following February Kenan landed a job
at Random House as a receptionist. Within a
year, he had been promoted, first to assistant to
the vice president and then to assistant editor at
Knopf. During this time, he continued to work
on a novel, A VISITATION OF SPIRITS (1989), which
was published by Grove Press. The novel is set in
Tims Creek, a rural Carolina community. Its cen-
tral family is the Crosses, similar to the Kenans in
being prominent, having white and black branches,
and having a town named after them. In creating
this world, which he continues to use in later fic-
tion, Kenan was influenced by William Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha County in inventing for it a his-
tory, a culture, and a set of recurring characters.
It is also possible to see, as he has acknowledged,
the importance of Katharine Anne Porter, Gabriel
Garcia Márquez, Yukio Mishima, and JAMES BALD-
WIN in his writing.
The publication of A Visitation of Spirits
opened new career possibilities for Kenan. He left
the publishing world in 1989 to begin teaching at
Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University. Since
1994 he has held various visiting writer positions
and is currently professor of creative writing at
the University of Memphis. During this time, he
pulled together some of the stories he began ear-
lier with material originally intended as part of A
Visitation of Spirits. This collection was published
as Let the Dead Bury the Dead (1992). It was nom-
inated for the Los Angeles Times Award, was a fi-
nalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award,
and was named a Notable Book for 1992 by The
New York Times.
Let the Dead Bury the Dead is a series of short
fiction about Tims Creek and a long oral history.
As in the novel, the central themes are death and
desire, in the context of the supernatural. The
stories that focus on desire are much more con-
ventionally realistic, though their subject matter
has generally been considered taboo, especially
among African-American writers. “The Founda-
tions of the Earth,” for example, tells of Maggie
MacGowan Williams’s developing friendship with
the white gay lover of her grandson, Edward. The
final story, or more properly novella, is also the
most radical in terms of structure. “Let the Dead
Bury the Dead” is set up as a book put together
by James Malachai Greene, found and edited by
Reginald Gregory Kain (who has the same initials
as Kenan). It is composed of an oral history, diary
entries, letters, and passages of academic discourse
on a variety of subjects, complete with footnotes.
The story told, primarily by Zeke (from A Visi-
tation of Spirits), is the history of Tims Creek, a
narrative of magic, racial violence, and a maroon
community created by escaped slaves, which even-
tually becomes the town.
Kenan’s two books since the short stories find
him turning away from fiction, though they still
involve narrative. In 1994, he published a short
biography of James Baldwin as part of the Lives
of Notable Gay Men and Women series, designed
for young adult readers. Walking on Water: Black
American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-first Cen-
tury addresses the question of what it means to be
black in America through interviews with dozens
of people from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts,
to Anchorage, Alaska, and from all walks of life.
Here, as elsewhere, Kenan focuses on the diversity
within black life as much as the difference it makes
in the nation. As he makes clear in the introduc-
tion, he does not believe that race is a fixed bio-
logical category but that it is a product of history
and culture. Early in his career, Randall Kenan has
displayed versatility not often found in writers of
any age. In long and short fiction, he has success-
fully combined the realistic and the fantastic, tra-
ditional storytelling with experimentation, and the
spiritual with the mundane.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Betts, Doris. “Randall Garrett Kenan: Myth and Re-
ality in Tims Creek.” In Southern Writers at Cen-
tury’s End, edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and James A.
Perkins, 9–20. Lexington: University Press of Ken-
tucky, 1997.
Harris, Trudier. The Power of the Porch: The Story-
teller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor,298 Kenan, Randall Garrett