Set in Homewood, the Black neighborhood of Pittsburgh's East End where Wideman was raised, the novel is narrated by Doot and moves non-linearly from the blues-filled 1920s to the drug-shadowed 1970s. Its intertwining lives include Lucy, Brother Tate, Carl French, and Albert Wilkes, a gifted blues pianist whose killing — witnessed by Lucy — haunts the community's memory. Through multiple voices, oral storytelling, music, and shifting time, Wideman traces four generations shaped by migration, work, art, policing, addiction, and confinement, and by the sustaining bonds of kinship and place. Creativity, especially music and storytelling, emerges as a means of transcending despair without denying it. The novel was named one of the best books of 1983 by the New York Times Book Review and received the PEN/Faulkner Award, establishing the Homewood books as a major achievement in American fiction.
Author: John Edgar Wideman · Original publisher: Avon Books (New York), 1983
