Stories of loners, outsiders, tricksters, addicts, jazzmen, and
drifters in the Jim Crow South--a classic of 1950s Black fiction.
Raw, fearless, ironic, the stories in Lover Man (1958) promised the
birth of a new sensibility in American fiction. Inspired by the bebop he
loved, and the philosophy he studied at the Sorbonne, Alston Anderson
looked back at the North Carolina of his youth to capture the hidden
lives of Black boys and men in the early 1940s. Fascinated by loners and
outsiders--tricksters, addicts, jazzmen, drifters, "queers"--and by the
spiritual cost exacted by the myths of white supremacy, Anderson
assembled an original kind of story collection, whose themes troubled
and bewildered many of his early readers. Although later championed by
Langston Hughes and Henry Louis Gates. Jr., among others, this--his only
collection--has remained out of print since the '50s.
In his afterword to this new edition, the literary historian Kinohi
Nishikawa investigates Anderson's brief but brilliant career, the
controversy his work provoked, and the light it sheds on his era.