Lover Man

Description

“A gem of Americana . . . These stories span the early decades of the 20th century and address with nuance the Black characters’ negotiations with youthful turmoil, sexual desire, and race in the U.S. . . . This deserves a place on the shelf of mid-century classics.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Stories of loners, outsiders, tricksters, addicts, jazzmen, and drifters in the Jim Crow South–a classic of 1950s Black fiction.

Raw, fearless, ironic, the stories in Lover Man (1958) promised the birth of a new sensibility in American fiction. Inspired by the bebop he loved, and the philosophy he studied at the Sorbonne, Alston Anderson looked back at the North Carolina of his youth to capture the hidden lives of Black boys and men in the early 1940s. Fascinated by loners and outsiders–tricksters, addicts, jazzmen, drifters, “queers”–and by the spiritual cost exacted by the myths of white supremacy, Anderson assembled an original kind of story collection, whose themes troubled and bewildered many of his early readers. Although later championed by Langston Hughes and Henry Louis Gates. Jr., among others, this–his only collection–has remained out of print since the ’50s.

In his afterword to this new edition, the literary historian Kinohi Nishikawa investigates Anderson’s pief but pilliant career, the controversy his work provoked, and the light it sheds on his era.

Binding Type: Paperback
Contributors: Alston Anderson,Kinohi Nishikawa (Afterword by)
Published: 02/07/2023
Publisher: McNally Editions
ISBN: 9781946022547
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 0.90″ H x 8.20″ L x 5.10″ W

About the Author
Alston Anderson (1924-2008) was born in Panama to Jamaican parents who brought him to North Carolina as a child. After serving in the Army during World War II, Anderson attended North Carolina College and Columbia University on the G.I. Bill, as well as the Sorbonne, where he studied German philosophy. Moving in expatriate circles, he overlapped with James Baldwin at Yaddo, stayed with Robert Graves in Majorca, and co-interviewed Nelson Algren with Terry Southern for the Paris Review. After Lover Man, he published one novel, All God’s Children, a critical and commercial failure. Following a series of personal and professional ruptures, Anderson vanished from the public record in the early 1970s until the time of his death in New York’s Bellevue Hospital.

Kinohi Nishikawa is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground. He teaches African American print culture at Princeton University.