"Clarence Major has a remarkable mind and the talent to match."
Toni Morrison



Clarence Major

Photo credit: Lynda Koolish
African American Writers: Portraits and Visions

 


I'm Interested, Tell Me More
2001 Mixed media, 24 x 30
by Clarence Major

Poet, novelist, and painter Clarence Major was born in 1936 in Atlanta, Georgia. He received a B.S. from the State University of New York and a Ph.D. from the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities.

Among his many honors and awards are a Western States Book Award for Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a National Council on the Arts Fellowship. Clarence Major is professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis.

 


Such Was The Season
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Format: Paperback, 224pp.
ISBN: 0807128651
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Pub. Date: April  2003

Through the rambling of Annie Eliza, matriarch of the family, readers receive a picture of her world, her past, her family, and ultimately herself: canny, curious, down-to-earth, compassionate, opinionated, yet capable of change.

 

Come By Here: My Mother's Life
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Format: Hardcover, 1st ed., 288pp.
ISBN: 0471415189
Publisher: Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated
Pub. Date: April  2002

Read an AALBC.com Review

"Inez was born in 1918 - looking white without being white. A light-skinned daughter of the Deep South, she grew up determined not to let Jim Crow put limits on her happiness. So she embraced her contradictions and decided to make a different life for herself and her family." "Now, decades later, her son, critically acclaimed poet and novelist Clarence Major, tells her story. Starting with his own childhood awakening to the realization that his mother could pass for white, Major reaches back to paint a brilliant portrait of a woman on intimate terms with mysteries, secrets, and her own truth." Escaping an abusive marriage, Inez would flee to Chicago, the city that became a symbol of her dilemmas as well as of her liberation. To survive, she had to leave her young children behind in the shadow of her past and under the color line. Passing as white, she would embark audaciously on a double life to earn a decent salary. To overcome every obstacle to her happiness, she would have to risk everything she loved and, finally, embrace herself.
 

All-Night Visitors
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Format: Paperback, 256pp.
ISBN: 1555534287
Publisher: Northeastern University Press
Pub. Date: April 2000
Edition Desc: Abridged

First published in 1969 in severely abridged form, Clarence Major's first novel is now available in an unexpurgated edition that restores the full text of his critically acclaimed and controversial work. Written in first-person narrative, All-Night Visitors is the riveting and compelling story of Eli Bolton - orphan, college dropout, Vietnam veteran, and sexual voyager - as he struggles to establish a meaningful self-identity in a chaotic and bigoted world.

 

Dirty Bird Blues
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Format: Hardcover, 1st ed., 224pp.
ISBN: 1562790838
Publisher: Mercury House
Pub. Date: May 1996
Edition Desc: 1st ed

Award-winning translator Red Pine, whose previous books from Mercury House include Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits and his translation of Sung Po-jen's Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom, renders the classic Chinese text into exquisite English in a breakthrough translation that includes for the first time essential commentaries, considered by Chinese scholars to be vital to understanding the wisdom of Taoism.

 

Configurations: New and Selected Poems, 1958-1998
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Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 323pp.
ISBN: 1556590903
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Pub. Date: September 1998
Edition Desc: 1 ED

This substantial volume, half of which is comprised of new and previously uncollected work, represents the first retrospective of novelist, anthologist, and poet Clarence Major's 40-year writing career. Informed by topics as diverse as racism, painting, travel, music, sexuality, and mythology, Major's poems reflect a love for the language which is infectious.

 

Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist
Bernard W. Bell (Editor)
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Format: Hardcover, 281pp.
ISBN: 0807825867
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, The
Pub. Date: January 2001

Bernard Bell's expansive anthology of writings by and about this protean figure in American arts is itself a major venture. It is an excellent collection of instigating essays that present valuable debates among themselves, debates about the changing nature of contemporary African-American writing and disputatious views on the subject of the postmodern.

 

Emergency Exit
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Format: Hardcover, 258pp.
ISBN: 0914590588
Publisher: Fiction Collective
Pub. Date: November 1979

 

 

 

Conversations with Clarence Major 
Nancy Bunge (Editor)

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Format: Paperback, 192pp.
ISBN: 1578064589
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Pub. Date: July 2002

 

 


Related Links

Major is featured in:
After Hours: A Collection of Erotic Writing by Black Men

edited by Robert Fleming
http://www.aalbc.com/reviews/afterhours.htm

Major was a principal of the Black Arts Movement
http://aalbc.com/authors/blackartsmovement.htm

Above Bio Excerpted from Academy of American Poets
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=505

Double Consciousness: The Paintings of Clarence Major - Art Exhibition
http://www.msu.edu/~kamuseum/exhibitions/online/clmajor/clmajor.htm


 

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