SOURCE: Rosen, Judith. “John Edgar Wideman.” In Writing for Your Life, edited by Sybil Steinberg, pp. 530-35. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

In the following essay, Rosen describes an interview with Wideman in which the author discusses the major thematic concerns of his stories and his insistence on publishing his fiction in paperback form.

John Edgar Wideman is a man who disdains labels, who refuses to allow either his life or art to be boxed in or dismissed by descriptive terms like “black writer.” The problem, he says, “is that it can be a kind of back-handed compliment. Are you being ghettoized at the same time as you are being praised?”

His writing, too, refuses to be pigeonholed. He has written one work of nonfiction, Brothers and Keepers, which was nominated for the National Book Award; three novels, including the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Sent for You Yesterday; and...