Fatheralong (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: John Edgar Wideman
- First Published: 1994
- Type of Work: Memoir
- Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Essays
- Subjects: African Americans, Discrimination, History, United States or Americans, Parents and children, Traveling or travelers, Racism, Race, South or Southerners, Marriage, Human race, Fathers, Divorce
- Locales: Pittsburgh, PA, Amherst, MA, Greenwood, SC
Fatheralong begins as a meditation on the lifelong shallowness that Wideman perceives in his ties to his own father, Edgar, and his recent efforts to redress the situation by cultivating a belated understanding of him. He hopes that such understanding might also foster the recovery of a larger male kinship across generations to reverse the psychic fatherlessness that he has come to regard as the normative condition of black sons in white America.
Two-thirds of the way into the text, however, John briefly alludes to his own imprisoned son—a situation he now shares with...
[The entire page is 762 words long]
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