Download or read book The Art and Life of Clarence Major written by Keith E. Byerman and published by . This book was released on 2016-05-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clarence Major is an award-winning painter, fiction writer, and poet-as well as an essayist, editor, anthologist, lexicographer, and memoirist. He has been part of twenty-eight group exhibitions, has had fifteen one-man shows, and has published fourteen collections of poetry and nine works of fiction. The author traces Major's life and career from his complex family history in Georgia through his encounters with important literary and artistic figures in Chicago and New York to his present status as a respected writer, artist, teacher, and scholar living in California.
Download or read book The Art and Life of Clarence Major written by Keith E. Byerman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clarence Major is an award-winning painter, fiction writer, and poet—as well as an essayist, editor, anthologist, lexicographer, and memoirist. He has been part of twenty-eight group exhibitions, has had fifteen one-man shows, and has published fourteen collections of poetry and nine works of fiction. The Art and Life of Clarence Major is the first critical biography of this innovative African American writer and visual artist. Given the full cooperation of his subject, Keith E. Byerman traces Major’s life and career from his complex family history in Georgia through his encounters with important literary and artistic figures in Chicago and New York to his present status as a respected writer, artist, teacher, and scholar living in California. In his introduction, Byerman asks, “How does a black man who does not take race as his principal identity, an artist who deliberately defies mainstream rules, a social and cultural critic who wants to be admired by the world he attacks, and a creator who refuses to commit to one expressive form make his way in the world?” Tasking himself with opening up the multiple layers of problems and solutions in both the work and the life to consider the successes and the failures, Byerman reveals Major as one who has devoted himself to a life of experimental art that has challenged both literary and painterly practice and the conventional understanding of the nature of African American art. Major’s refusal to follow the rules has challenged readers and critics, but through it all, he has continued to produce quality work as a painter, poet, and novelist. His is the life of someone totally devoted to his creative work, one who has put his artistic vision ahead of fame, wealth, and sometimes even family. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.
Download or read book Dirty Bird Blues written by Clarence Major and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quietly influential force in African American literature and art, Clarence Major makes his Penguin Classics debut with the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Dirty Bird Blues The PRH Audio book of Dirty Bird Blues by Clarence Major won a 2022 EARPHONE AWARD. Narrated by Dion Graham. A Penguin Classic Set in post-World War II Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks, a young, harmonica-blowing blues singer who is always writing music in his head. Torn between his friendships with fellow musicians and nightclub life and his responsibilities to his wife and child, along with the pressures of dealing with a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on. He moves to Omaha with hopes of better opportunities as a blue-collar worker, but the blues in his soul and the dreams in his mind keep bringing him back to face himself. After a nightmarish descent into his own depths, Manfred emerges with fresh awareness and possibility. Through Manfred, we witness and experience the process by which modern American English has been vitalized and strengthened by the poetry and the poignancy of the African-American experience. As Manfred struggles with the oppressive constraints of society and his private turmoil, his rich inner voice resonates with the blues.
Download or read book The Art and Life of Clarence Major written by Keith Eldon Byerman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clarence Major is an award-winning painter, fiction writer, and poet-as well as an essayist, editor, anthologist, lexicographer, and memoirist. He has been part of twenty-eight group exhibitions, has had fifteen one-man shows, and has published fourteen collections of poetry and nine works of fiction. The author traces Major's life and career from his complex family history in Georgia through his encounters with important literary and artistic figures in Chicago and New York to his present status as a respected writer, artist, teacher, and scholar living in California.
Download or read book My Amputations written by Clarence Major and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2008-01-07 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel is about a man pursued by his shadow. Its protagonist is either a desperate ex-con who has become convinced that he is an important American novelist or a desperate American novelist who has become convinced that he, and most of what passes for literary life on three continents, is a con.
Download or read book Thunderclouds in the Forecast written by Clarence Major and published by TriQuarterly Books. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel follows two friends, one Black and one white, who grew up wards of the state in New York. As adults, Ray has found success while Scotty struggles, but both seek love, comfort, and a place in the world.
Download or read book The Paintings and Drawings of Clarence Major written by Clarence Major and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first volume to collect the paintings and drawings of Clarence Major, readers are offered six decades of unique, colorful, and compelling canvases and works on paper—works of singular beauty and social relevance. These works represent Major’s personal painterly journey of passionate commitment to art. This generous selection of more than 150 paintings and drawings shows us the melding of rich ideas and fertile images, the braiding of imagination and motif. With their pleasing arrangement of elements, the works come vividly to life. Major often juxtaposes a decorative scheme with his own unique choice of color combinations, reinforced with rigorous brushstrokes that release chromatic energy. The paintings complement and challenge the great traditions of Realism, Impressionism, and Expressionism. Major is primarily a figurative and landscape painter. Here we find landscapes of singular vitality, rich in color and design, dramatic landscapes, and cityscapes representing, among other things, Major’s extensive travels in America and Europe. We are also treated to Major’s signature figurative work. In these paintings, he ventures fearlessly into familiar yet unexpected areas of richness. Also included is an introductory essay, “The Education of a Painter,” written by the artist, which further sheds light on and helps to lay a biographical, social, and historical foundation for this essential volume, reflecting a lifetime of serious commitment to painting at its best.
Download or read book The Lurking Place written by Clarence Major and published by . This book was released on 2021-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging new novel by African-American literary icon Clarence Major reveals personal and political parallels between the past and present.
Download or read book Seizing the Word written by Keith E. Byerman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seizing the Word offers a comprehensive reading of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), a pivotal figure in the intellectual life of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. As a historian, journalist, novelist, poet, and social and literary critic, this extraordinary man profoundly influenced our understanding of the African American experience. Following his initial discussion of Du Bois's earliest writing, Keith E. Byerman posits The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a master text that established the tropes of doubleconsciousness and the veil for which Du Bois is known, and incorporated the various genres through which he voiced his understanding of the world. The remainder of the study discusses Du Bois's works as elaborations of the master text within and against the contemporary discourses on history, art, and self. Throughout Byerman examines the connections between the personal and intellectual aspects of Du Bois's life to reveal the intense engagement with moral and ideological issues found even in texts that Du Bois represented as “objective.” At the same time, in order to present some of the complexity and conflict that runs through Du Bois's work, Byerman identifies the tensions and patterns in Du Bois's writing that cross disciplines or genres. Instead of focusing on one aspect of Du Bois's career, Seizing the Word attempts a more synthetic approach, primarily by examining Du Bois in terms of contemporary literary and cultural theory, most notably Lacan's Law of the Father and Erikson's work on identity.
Download or read book Black Slang written by Clarence Major and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1970 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction written by Keith Byerman and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-05-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.
Download or read book My Grandfather s Son written by Clarence Thomas and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provocative, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest, My Grandfather's Son is the story of one of America's most remarkable and controversial leaders, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told in his own words. Thomas speaks out, revealing the pieces of his life he holds dear, detailing the suffering and injustices he has overcome, including the polarizing Senate hearing involving a former aide, Anita Hill, and the depression and despair it created in his own life and the lives of those closest to him. In this candid and deeply moving memoir, a quintessential American tale of hardship and grit, Clarence Thomas recounts his astonishing journey for the first time.
Download or read book Fingering the Jagged Grain written by Keith Eldon Byerman and published by . This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Paintings and Drawings of Clarence Major written by Clarence Major and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first volume to collect the paintings and drawings of Clarence Major, readers are offered six decades of unique, colorful, and compelling canvases and works on paper—works of singular beauty and social relevance. These works represent Major’s personal painterly journey of passionate commitment to art. This generous selection of more than 150 paintings and drawings shows us the melding of rich ideas and fertile images, the braiding of imagination and motif. With their pleasing arrangement of elements, the works come vividly to life. Major often juxtaposes a decorative scheme with his own unique choice of color combinations, reinforced with rigorous brushstrokes that release chromatic energy. The paintings complement and challenge the great traditions of Realism, Impressionism, and Expressionism. Major is primarily a figurative and landscape painter. Here we find landscapes of singular vitality, rich in color and design, dramatic landscapes, and cityscapes representing, among other things, Major’s extensive travels in America and Europe. We are also treated to Major’s signature figurative work. In these paintings, he ventures fearlessly into familiar yet unexpected areas of richness. Also included is an introductory essay, “The Education of a Painter,” written by the artist, which further sheds light on and helps to lay a biographical, social, and historical foundation for this essential volume, reflecting a lifetime of serious commitment to painting at its best.
Download or read book Clarence Major and His Art written by Bernard W. Bell and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a collection of Clarence Major's poetry, fiction, and art, providing critical interpretations alongside each selection.
Download or read book Dirty Bird Blues written by Clarence Major and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quietly influential force in African American literature and art, Clarence Major makes his Penguin Classics debut with the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Dirty Bird Blues The PRH Audio book of Dirty Bird Blues by Clarence Major won a 2022 EARPHONE AWARD. Narrated by Dion Graham. A Penguin Classic Set in post-World War II Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks, a young, harmonica-blowing blues singer who is always writing music in his head. Torn between his friendships with fellow musicians and nightclub life and his responsibilities to his wife and child, along with the pressures of dealing with a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on. He moves to Omaha with hopes of better opportunities as a blue-collar worker, but the blues in his soul and the dreams in his mind keep bringing him back to face himself. After a nightmarish descent into his own depths, Manfred emerges with fresh awareness and possibility. Through Manfred, we witness and experience the process by which modern American English has been vitalized and strengthened by the poetry and the poignancy of the African-American experience. As Manfred struggles with the oppressive constraints of society and his private turmoil, his rich inner voice resonates with the blues.
Download or read book Conversations with Clarence Major written by Clarence Major and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2002 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected interviews that show how the mind of an enormously talented and multifaceted artist works while conveying a sense of the generosity and optimism that keep him experimenting and learning
