Max Reddick, a Black novelist, journalist, and sometime presidential speechwriter, is dying when the novel opens, and his final journey to Europe becomes a reckoning with the whole of his postwar life. Traveling to Paris for the funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames — a figure modeled in part on Richard Wright — and then to Amsterdam to see his estranged Dutch wife Margrit, Reddick recalls his struggles for work, love, and artistic freedom inside white publishing houses, newsrooms, and government circles in America, Europe, and Africa. Among Ames's papers he uncovers evidence of a secret American government plan, the King Alfred Plan, aimed at Black Americans in the event of racial uprising. Part roman à clef, part political thriller, and part meditation on the cost exacted from Black writers asked to represent a race, the novel moves between intimate retrospection and an explosive conspiracy revelation.
Author: John A. Williams · Original publisher: Little, Brown and Company (Boston), 1967
