Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sent for You Yesterday | 1981 | John Edgar Wideman | Buy |
| 2 | Hiding Place | 1981 | John Edgar Wideman | Buy |
| 3 | Damballah | 1984 | John Edgar Wideman | Buy |
The Homewood Trilogy is John Edgar Wideman’s most celebrated achievement. All three books share characters and settings rooted in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where Wideman grew up. Sent for You Yesterday, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1984, follows a group of friends through the postwar decades. Hiding Place focuses on a woman living alone on a hill above Homewood who must decide whether to shelter a young relative running from the law. Damballah is a collection of linked stories tracing the family line from an enslaved ancestor to the present day.
The trilogy can be read in any order, though many readers start with Sent for You Yesterday. Wideman blends memory, myth, and street-level realism in a style that earned him comparisons to Faulkner. The New York Times called him “one of America’s premier writers of fiction” in response to these books, and for many scholars they represent his artistic breakthrough.