Goodbye Sweetwater: New & Selected Stories

By Henry Dumas

Book Overview

The cult of Henry Dumas has continued to pulsate with ever-widening life since his premature death by gunshot in a New York City subway on May 23, 1968. By the time of his death at age thirty-three, Dumas had completed a Ulyssean journey, beginning in his hometown of Sweet Home, Arkansas; taking him to New York City, where he finished high school; to City College & Rutgers University; to the Arabian Peninsula with the U.S. Air Force; through tent cities in Mississippi & Tennessee; into civil rights activities & the little magazine circuit; though Hiram College as assistant director of Upward Bound; & finally, to Southern Illinois University's Experiment in Higher Education, in East St. Louis, where he served as teacher-counselor & director of language workshops. Throughout his journey, Dumas wrote poems & heroic tales-tales through which he projected a powerful fictional universe of folk & fantasy, an Afro-centered mirror-world of surrealism, supernationalism, gothicism, madness, nightmarism, child-men, astrology, death, magic, witchcraft, & science fiction. Goodbye, Sweetwater, the latest collection of Dumas's work, features short stories & novel selections from Ark of Bones, Jonoah & the Green Stone, & Rope of Wind, as well as never before published stories.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0938410598
• ISBN13: 9780938410591
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press
• Length: 347 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

What the literate look for in written works

Mr. Dumas' voice is clear, concise and engrossing. His quiet tone only makes the plot stand out more. His voice fades away and you are left in the scene, alone with the protagonist and his or her foe or friend. The many stories here are the works of his genius. The characters and the environments in which they move are fully developed. This is a work that the avid reader cannot put down.