SOURCE: "Going Back Home: The Literary Development of John Edgar Wideman," in CLA Journal, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, March, 1985, pp. 326-43.

Coleman is an American educator. In the following essay, he delineates Wideman's return to the thematic realm of family and community in his works following The Lynchers.

In a 1972 interview [reprinted in Interviews with Black Writers, edited by John O'Brien, 1973], John Edgar Wideman repeatedly stated that in Hurry Home (1969) and The Lynchers (1973) he was interested in portraying the world of his black characters' imaginations. The imagination is a hellish, nightmarish place where the characters suffer the fears and horrors of past and present black reality in America. The story of the black past, present, and future that emerges is negative and hopeless.

The four black conspirators in The Lynchers, who have a revolutionary plan that is supposed to begin with the symbolic lynching of a white policeman and...