The Essential Clarence Major

“Major has long been recognized by scholars of African American literature; yet unfortunately, this quirky but highly engaging author is far less well known by general readers. This anthology of his fiction, nonfiction, and poetry should help to rectify the situation.”—Library Journal

“In many rewarding ways, the sections of The Essential Clarence Major, even as the works sometimes seem to bleed across the bar liens between prose and poetry, conjoin to give readers one artist’s decades-long living at those boundaries, and isn’t ‘nature’ another way of saying the essential?”—American Literary History

“A well-packaged collection of novel excerpts, short stories, essays, memoir, and poetry that will give the reader a generous sampling of [Major’s] creative range. The segments of his prose writing are most revealing and intriguing. . . . As a craftsman, he possesses the prowess as a consummate writer, capable of providing effective characterization, dialogue or setting.”—Neworld Review

“The Essential Clarence Major bares evidence. This cache of poetry and prose—fiction, essays, and memoir—is timely and brilliant. Major is bold. His sway of truth is delivered calmly and, at times, satirically. There’s no other American voice like his. His sense of history, humor, and love, all are uniquely Clarence Major—the man, the artist.”—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Emperor of Water Clocks

“Clarence Major’s attention to the details particular to black life—his ability to capture the real-life surrealistic quality of these details—is only matched by his commitment to a kind of experimentation that expands and defies our ideas about the boundaries of genre. This isn’t just a book of great literature. This is a book of history.”—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

“To see the decades of Clarence Major’s work presented in this way is to confirm that any writer armed with relentless curiosity and a vast toolbox of language can pursue the work in whatever form it arrives to them, be it the long sprawl of fiction or the precise and surgical poetic line. I found myself renewed after spending time with this work. Seeing all of the limits I once imagined slowly vanish.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster and Go Ahead in the Rain

“Clarence Major has been so prolific, so eclectic, so multifaceted that it has been difficult for the literary community to get its mind around his oeuvre. The Essential Clarence Major presents a rare opportunity to galvanize and project the literary legacy of one of America’s most important writers, giving readers the rare opportunity to hold a library in one hand. This is an invaluable aid in the teaching of mid-twentieth-century African American poetry and fiction and will provide a tool for students of African American letters to grapple with his work as a whole.”—Randall Kenan, editor of The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin

“American renaissance man Clarence Major’s gifts are vast: a lexicographer of black slang, an artist, a photographer, an editor and critic, a poet and writer of experimental and conventional fiction. The Essential Clarence Major is not merely an anthology of popular titles—it is the definitive showcase, an introduction for those playing catch-up, a treasure trove for his devotees. This work makes the case that Major’s diverse and complex career and his unique literary ambitions belong on the front display table in the American library of literature.”—Wilton Barnhardt, author of Lookaway, Lookaway: A Novel and Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ Tales of North Carolina