John Edgar Wideman (born June 14, 1941) is an American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, and essayist. He was the first person to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice. His writing is known for experimental techniques and a focus on the African-American experience.
Raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, Wideman excelled as a student athlete at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1963, he became the second African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford. In addition to his work as a writer, Wideman has had a career in academia as a literature and creative writing professor at both public and Ivy League universities.
In his writing, Wideman has explored the complexities of race, family, trauma, storytelling, and justice in the United States. His personal experience, including the incarceration of his brother, has played a significant role in his work.
He is a professor emeritus at Brown University and lives in New York City and France.
Early life and education Wideman was born on June 14, 1941, in Washington, D.C., the oldest of five children of Edgar (1918–2001) and Bette (née French; 1921–2008) Wideman.
Wideman traces his roots to the period of American slavery. On his mother's side, his great-great-great-grandmother was a slave from Maryland who had children with her master's son. Together, they relocated to Pittsburgh either during or immediately after the American Civil War. According to Wideman family lore, this ancestor first settled the area that eventually became the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood, despite the fact that a white lawyer and politician, William Wilkins, is credited with founding the community. On Wideman's father's side, his ancestors have been traced to rural South Carolina, where records indicate there were both white and African-American Widemans, including one who owned slaves. Wideman's paternal grandfather moved to Pittsburgh as part of the Great Migration of the early 20th century, when many African Americans fled Southern states.
Wideman's father, Edgar, graduated high school in Pittsburgh, where he was an avid basketball player. After marrying Wideman's mother, Bette, he moved with her to Washington, D.C., for a job in the U.S. Government Printing Office. The couple moved back to Pittsburgh's Homewood neighborhood after Wideman was born in 1941. During World War II, Wideman's father enlisted in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, and on Saipan. After the War, he worked several jobs simultaneously, including as a waiter and sanitation worker, in order to support the family. Wideman's youngest brother, Robert, was born in 1951 while the family was living in Homewood. With the support of Edgar's earnings, the family was able to move to Shadyside, a predominantly white neighborhood, allowing Wideman to attend Peabody High School.
Wideman's teachers had noted his intelligence from an early age, and he proved to be an outstanding student. In high school, he was a star basketball player, president of the student body, and valedictorian of his class. However, Wideman was socially cautious, especially around white students. Interviewed for an article in 1963, one of his white classmates recalled Wideman telling her that "he wouldn't want to be seen on the street alone with a white girl" and that "when class breaks came, he would seldom walk to the next class with the white students".
College
Wideman attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was offered a Benjamin Franklin Scholarship for academic merit and was one of a small number of African Americans to enroll in 1959. In his memoir, Brothers and Keepers, he described a heated freshman-year encounter with a white student in the dorm room of an African-American friend: the white student claimed to know more about blues music than Wideman did, and his friend refused to offer support. According to Wideman, the encounter left him feeling that he had "no place to hide", and he was in an environment "that continually set me against them and against myself". Feeling alienated, he decided to quit college, but was stopped by his basketball coach at a bus station, where Wideman was about to board a bus back to Pittsburgh.
Addressing his brother in Brothers and Keepers, he summarized his motivation:Once again, Wideman excelled academically and in athletics, becoming a star basketball player. By his senior year, he was captain of the basketball team, which he led in scoring, and was named to the "All Ivy League" team. While his team lost the Ivy League championship to Princeton University his senior year, they won the "Big 5" tournament, which has traditionally determined the best college basketball team in Philadelphia, pitting Penn against Villanova, Saint Joseph's, La Salle, and Temple universities. For his academic achievements, which included winning campus-wide awards for both creative and scholarly writing, Wideman was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa national honor society.
In 1963, before graduating with a bachelor's degree in English, Wideman was named a Rhodes Scholar, becoming the second African American to win the prestigious award from the University of Oxford. The achievement brought him national attention: he was profiled in Look that spring, in an article entitled "The Astonishing John Wideman". It described Wideman as having been "showered with so many academic and athletic honors, awards and 'firsts' that he is unable to enumerate them. He sometimes forgets that he won a prize that another student would consider the high point of a college career".
In the fall of 1963, Wideman moved to England to begin his studies at Oxford, where he pursued a thesis on 18th-century British fiction. He also continued to play basketball and was captain of the Oxford University men's basketball team, where one of his teammates was fellow Rhodes Scholar, and future NBA All-Star and United States Senator, Bill Bradley. The two had played against each other as undergraduates, when Bradley was at Princeton. At Oxford, their team won the 1965 B.U.S.F. National Championship and the 1966 A.B.B.A. National Championship.
In 1965, Wideman married Judith Goldman, a white Jewish woman from Long Island whom he began dating when both were undergraduates at Penn. The following year, Wideman received a BPhil degree from Oxford and returned to the U.S. He spent the 1966–67 academic year at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he studied under Kurt Vonnegut and José Donoso.
Writing and teaching career
Philadelphia and early novels In 1967, Wideman accepted a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania. That summer, his first novel, A Glance Away, was published. Wideman's editor, Hiram Haydn, had seen his profile in Look and contacted Wideman before he left for Oxford, asking the aspiring author to send him his writing. While Wideman was at Oxford, Haydn read the unfinished manuscript of A Glance Away and agreed to publish it. The novel garnered positive reviews. A reviewer in The New York Times Book Review described Wideman as "a novelist of high seriousness and depth" who had written "a powerfully inventive" debut.
Responding to student demand, Wideman offered Penn's first classes in African-American literature in 1968. In the same year, his first son, Daniel, was born. Wideman also became an assistant coach for the varsity men's basketball team for which he had played as a student.
In 1970, Wideman's second son, Jacob, was born. In the same year, his second novel, Hurry Home, was published. A reviewer for The New York Times admired the novel's "dazzling display" of "Joycean" prose and Wideman's "formidable command of the techniques of fiction".
Wideman's initial courses in African-American literature grew into a program in African American Studies, which Wideman helped to establish. From 1971 to 1973, he served as director of the program. In 1972, he stepped down as an assistant basketball coach.
In 1973, Wideman's third novel, The Lynchers, was published. Examining violent strains of black nationalist ideology that had emerged during the 1960s, the novel depicts African-American characters who plan to lynch a white police officer. Writing in The New York Times, Anatole Broyard claimed that Wideman "can make an ordinary scene sing the blues like nobody's business", although he found the novel to be flawed.
In 1974, Wideman was promoted to a full professorship of English at Penn, and he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue research in African-American literature. However, he had already begun to look for a reprieve from his duties at the institution, as well as life in Philadelphia, in order to focus on his writing and raising a family. Having previously visited the University of Wyoming, he accepted an offer to join its faculty.
Wyoming, brother's murder conviction, literary success Wideman joined the faculty of the University of Wyoming in 1975. That same year, Wideman's daughter, Jamila, was born. The circumstances of her birth were traumatic, as a complication caused Wideman's wife, Judith, to be transported by ambulance from Laramie, Wyoming, to Denver, Colorado, where Jamila was born two months premature.
After the family returned to Laramie, Wideman learned that his brother Robert, with whom he had grown up in Homewood, was a fugitive. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the neighborhood was in a state of decline—it has frequently been described as a ghetto. Robert began to use drugs, a habit which he supported via petty crime. In November 1975, along with two accomplices, he participated in a robbery scheme that went awry when the intended victim, a fence named Nicola Morena, fled. One of Robert's accomplices shot Morena as he ran. A short time later, a passerby encountered the wounded man and called for an ambulance. Morena was taken to the nearest hospital, which did not have the surgeon necessary to treat his wound, and after a period of waiting, he was transported to another hospital, where he died. The victim's family later filed a lawsuit against the city of Pittsburgh, the hospitals and doctors involved, and the ambulance drivers, claiming negligence. That suit was not successful, although the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania acknowledged that a delay in Morena's treatment was "a contributing factor in causing his death". The family ultimately settled a malpractice lawsuit against the hospital system.
Robert and his accomplices fled Pittsburgh and arrived in Laramie, where Wideman let them spend a night in his house, an act he has attributed to naïveté. Robert and his accomplices then drove to Colorado, where they were apprehended. Afterward, police in Wyoming accused Wideman of aiding a fugitive, but no charges were filed.
According to Pennsylvania law, because the attempted armed robbery of Morena resulted in a homicide, the charge against the shooter was second-degree murder, and because Robert was an accomplice, he faced the same charge as the shooter. At trial, Robert was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. All of his appeals failed.
Wideman incorporated his brother's experience into his work. After an eight-year publication hiatus, he published two books simultaneously: a story collection, Damballah, and a novel, Hiding Place, both of which appeared in 1981 and allude to the events that resulted in Robert's imprisonment. He followed these books with another novel, Sent for You Yesterday, in 1983. Because these books share characters and a setting in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood, they are frequently referred to as the "Homewood trilogy".