Brothers and Keepers
by John Edgar Wideman
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At a glance:
- Author: John Edgar Wideman
- First Published: 1984
- Type of Work: Memoir
- Genres: Nonfiction, Autobiography
- Subjects: African Americans, Justice, Teaching or teachers, Memory, Prisoners, Love or romance, Crime or criminals, Brothers, Law or legislation, Novelists
- Locales: United States, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wyoming, North America, Detroit, Michigan, Laramie, Wyoming, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The Work
Brothers and Keepers demonstrates Wideman’s complex personal, sociological, and artistic response to his brother Rob’s life sentence for murder in 1978. In it he sees writ large the pathological interplay of white exploitation, racist neglect, and internal despair that have intensified, rather than lessened, in America’s cities since the 1960’s. Like the narrator of The Homewood Trilogy, Wideman presents himself with a bittersweet awareness that, in contrast to Rob, his lifelong efforts to straddle black and white cultural expectations have...
(The entire page is 1332 words.)
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