Who is John Edgar Wideman?
BIO
One of the great, award-winning writers of the last century and this, John Edgar Wideman grew up in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh and set a number of his early novels and stories there. According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature: 'His works mix the disparate forces of his life into an artistic form that is both intellectually challenging and experimental in the best sense of the word. A prolific novelist and essayist, Wideman's texts consistently blend voices and genres and challenge the reader. Responding self-consciously to contemporary jazz forms, his later work is filled with free-form ad-libbing, discontinuity, and always a rich integration of voices'." A true gem of the city of Pittsburgh, Wideman is a prolific writer, the world over.
Wideman's acclaim is vast - he is the first person to win the International Pen/Faulkner Award twice, a Rhodes Scholar and in 2016 was chosen as a recipient of the McArthur Genius Award. Wideman's awards, while numerous, do not demonstrate the vast and expansive effect he has had on writers, and readers, all over the world.
The John Edgar Wideman Experience
March 21, 2018
John Edgar Wideman Grapples With America's Continuing Slavery Legacy In 'American Histories'
Writer John Edgar Wideman's new collection of short stories "American Histories" explores issues of race through historical figures like abolitionists John Brown and Frederick Douglass up through modern times...
January 26, 2017
John Edgar Wideman Against the World
John Edgar Wideman likes to be in places where people don’t know who he is or what he does for a living. He spends most of the year in New York, but two of his favorite people here are his barber and his massage therapist, both Chinese immigrants who barely speak English. He was explaining this to me in December, over a lunch of rare steak-frites and Bordeaux at Lucien, a bistro a few blocks from his Lower East Side apartment. “I go to a bar, I get to know the bartenders and the manager,” he said. “That’s where I get my mezcal, that’s my place, that’s what I do. But parties, hanging out?” He shook his head. “I don’t have anybody living around me who has much of a sense of what I do. That’s exactly what I like."...