John A. Williams, arguably the finest Afro-American novelist of his generation, is certainly among the most prolific. His fiction is characterized by complex and inventive narrative structures which often employ impending death as the occasion for moving fluidly through time and memory in unexpected ways to reveal a significant human story. Williams's novels are distinguished also by a synthesis of the historical discipline of the biographer with the imaginative freedom of the novelist in order to document with authority and insight the lives of black Americans. Although Williams focuses on the experience of American blacks, he composes on a broad geographic, social, and temporal scale, for he believes that the largely untold experiences of ordinary black men and women are intrinsic to the American experience. John A. Williams , above all, is blunt and uncompromising about the truth as he sees it.

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1925 and raised...