Alston Anderson
© William Graves
Alston Anderson (1924–2008) was born in Panama to Jamaican parents who brought him to North Carolina as a child. After serving in the Army during World War II, Anderson attended North Carolina College and Columbia University on the G.I. Bill, as well as the Sorbonne, where he studied German philosophy. Moving in expatriate circles, he overlapped with James Baldwin at Yaddo, stayed with Robert Graves in Majorca, and co-interviewed Nelson Algren with Terry Southern for the Paris Review. After Lover Man, he published one novel, All God’s Children, a critical and commercial failure. Following a series of personal and professional ruptures, Anderson vanished from the public record in the early 1970s until the time of his death in New York’s Bellevue Hospital.
Alston Anderson
Afterword by Kinohi Nishikawa
“A gem of Americana . . . These stories span the early decades of the 20th century and address with nuance the Black characters’ negotiations with youthful turmoil, sexual desire, and race in the U.S. . . . This deserves a place on the shelf of mid-century classics.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
A classic of 1950s Black fiction: stories of loners, outsiders, tricksters, addicts, jazzmen, and drifters in the Jim Crow South by “a writer with a perfect ear, a warm heart, and an amazing capacity to seize character and make it live” (Selden Rodman, The New York Times)