John Edgar Wideman books

Anthologies

Best American Short Stories

Collections

Homewood Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Standalone Novels

John Edgar Wideman was born in Washington, D.C. in 1941 and grew up in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, a place that would become central to much of his fiction. He was the second African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship, studying at the University of Oxford before launching a writing career that now spans more than fifty years. His early novels, including A Glance Away and Hurry Home, showed his literary range, but it was the Homewood Trilogy that brought him wide recognition.

His nonfiction is just as significant as his fiction. Brothers and Keepers, his 1984 memoir about his brother Robby’s life sentence for armed robbery, remains one of the most honest accounts of how race and class split two brothers from the same household. Writing to Save a Life, about the father of Emmett Till, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His most recent nonfiction, Slaveroad (2024), uses the concept of the slave trade route as a way to examine Black life in America across centuries.

Wideman has also been a prolific short story writer. His collection Fever drew on the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, and Briefs pushed into flash fiction territory. He edited anthologies like Go the Way Your Blood Beats and My Soul Has Grown Deep, and his selected stories in You Made Me Love You pull from decades of work.