subject positions for African Americans to assume
in the world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Larimer, Kevin. “Industrial Strength in the Informa-
tion Age: A Profile of Colson Whitehead.” Poets
and Writers (July–August 2001): 21–25.
Howard Rambsy II
Wideman, John Edgar (1941– )
An intellectual, educator, novelist, essayist, biogra-
pher, short fiction writer, social critic, and com-
mentator, Wideman was born in Washington,
D.C., to John Edgar Lawson and Lizabeth French
Wideman; he grew up at the foot of Bruston Hill
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Homewood commu-
nity. His maternal great-great-great-grandmother,
Sybela Owens, a runaway slave, was among the
original founders and settlers of this community. A
Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Penn-
sylvania, which he attended on a Benjamin Frank-
lin Scholarship, Wideman was also the captain of
the university’s basketball team. He graduated with
a B.A. degree in English in 1963. Wideman holds
the distinction of being only the second African-
American Rhodes Scholar. He graduated from
Oxford University in 1966, where he studied phi-
losophy. Before launching his teaching career at the
University of Pennsylvania, where he also chaired
the African American studies program, Wideman
spent a year as a Kent Fellow at the University of
Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. He later relocated to the
University of Wyoming in Laramie, where he spent
more than a decade, and then to the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst.
Wideman is considered one of the finest 20th-
century American writers and is often compared
to William Faulkner. In 1967, at age 26, Wideman
published his first novel, A Glance Away. Although
this first work appeared during the BLACK ARTS
MOVEMENT, Wideman clearly wanted to distance
himself from the black literary avant-garde, whose
architects were championing a more BLACK AES-
THETIC approach to African-American literature.
Unlike his contemporaries LeRoi Jones (AMIRI
BARAKA), LARRY NEAL, and ADDISON GAYLE, who
were more interested in making African-American
art the “spiritual sister” of the BLACK POWER con-
cept, Wideman—as he writes in his autobiography,
BROTHERS AND KEEPERS (1984), written with his
brother Robert (Robby)—when he left Pittsburgh
to attend University of Pennsylvania in Philadel-
phia was running toward freedom, which, for him,
meant “running away from Pittsburgh, from pov-
erty, from blackness” (26–27).
As Wideman explained to John O’Brien in a
1976 interview, classically trained, he was interested
in experimenting with the form of the novel, as did
the “experimentalist” 18th-century British writers
who stand in the vanguard of the beginning of the
novel, including “Defoe, Fielding, and particularly
Laurence Sterne. If there is any single book I learned
a hell of a lot from, it’s Tristram Shandy” (O’Brien,
217). As he read more African-American writers,
however, Wideman also became interested in the
novels of RICHARD WRIGHT and RALPH ELLISON. He
was particularly interested in JEAN TOOMER’s Cane
“because of its experimentation and open form
and also because of Toomer’s vision” (216).
Wideman, a former basketball star, is the author
of eight novels, three collections of short stories,
and three collections of social and autobiographical
essays. Wideman’s second and third novels, Hurry
Home (1969) and The Lynchers (1973), confirmed
his willingness to continue to move away from a
validation and fuller exploration of the unique
qualities of the African-American experience (par-
ticularly language and issues of race) as the seri-
ous and legitimate subject matter for art, although
The Lynchers indicated a minor movement in that
general direction. He peopled his fictional worlds
with major white and black characters, establish-
ing a more universal or basic human experience as
his central concern. Nevertheless, Wideman could
not escape the racial label “black” writer. In fact,
critics continued to place him in the vanguard of
contemporary black literature.
From 1975 to 1983, Wideman took an eight-
year hiatus during which he tried “to learn to
use a difference voice.” During this period, he
explains, “I was ‘woodshedding,’ as the musicians
would say—catching up.... I was learning a new550 Wideman, John Edgar