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Henry Dumas

Born: 1934 in Sweet Home, Arkansas
Died: 1968 in New York

Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Dumas became a teacher-counselor and director of language workshops at Southern Illinois University's Experiment in Higher Education in 1967 in East St. Louis.

Biography: Henry Dumas had a varied career. He was a Contributor, editor, publisher, and distributor for various literary magazines. Dumas worked at SIU under the direction of Dr. Edward W. Crosby, who was also an editor of the Hiram Review at the time. Some of Dumas' early work was published in the Hiram Review, which is likely how the two became acquainted. Dumas also became an editor of the Hiram Review from 1967 until his death in 1968. After Dumas' untimely death Dr. Crosby returned to the editorial staff of the Hiram Review and urged Eugene Redmond, one of Dumas' fellow teachers and poet, to talk to Loretta Dumas about publishing Henry's works posthumously. Arrangements were made and with the editorial assistance of Hale Chatfield, founder of the Hiram Poetry Review, his works were published by SIU Press.


Awards:

Primary Literary Genre(s): Fiction; Poetry

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Henry Dumas on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=henry+dumas


Selected Titles

Ark of bones and other stories /
ISBN: 0394709470 OCLC: 841667

Ark of bones, and other stories
ISBN: 0809304422 OCLC: 118473

Echo tree :
ISBN: 1566891493 OCLC: 52381052

Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN : ©2003.

Henry Dumas's fabulist fiction is a masterful synthesis of myth and religion, culture and nature, mask and identity. From the Deep South to the simmering streets of Harlem, his characters embark on surreal and mythic quests armed with only their wit, their words, and their wisdom. With an astonishing ear for language, Dumas creates a mythology of the psychological, spiritual, and political development of African American culture by interweaving elements of Christian metaphor, African tradition, southern folklore, American music and America's history of slavery and endemic racism. For the first time, all of Dumas's short fiction is collected here, including several previously unpublished stories.

ECHO TREE :
ISBN: 156689512X OCLC: 1030900554

COFFEE House, [Place of publication not identified], 2018.

Jonoah and the green stone /
ISBN: 0394497910 OCLC: 1975973

Random House, New York : ©1976.

The hauntingly beautiful story of a young black man from Arkansas trying to deal with the turbulence of the sixties.

Knees of a natural man :
ISBN: 0938410741 OCLC: 18908759

Thunder's Mouth Press ; New York : ©1989.

Rope of wind and other stories /
ISBN: 0394505298 OCLC: 4593242

Random House, New York : ©1979.

 

 

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