SOURCE: "Josef gkvorecky and the Tradition of Jazz Literature," in World Literature Today, Vol. 54, No. 4, Autumn, 1980, pp. 586-90.

In the following essay, Szwed first discusses American jazz fiction dealing with race relations and then turns his attention to the jazz fiction of the Czechoslovakian writer Josef Skvoreckf, illustrating how Skvoreckj' uses jazz as a metaphor for revolution.

The idea of the universality of the black experience in the West is so common that it seems too banal to mention. It comprises a subtext in the writings of Twain, Melville, Faulkner, maybe half of American literature. A smaller group of writers—DuBois, those of the Harlem Renaissance, Norman Mailer—have told us that part of this experience is its ability to be communicated indirectly, through images of the body, through art, music, dance. The theoretical appeal of blacks also represented for late nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists an escape from...