Author: johnedgarwideman

One of John Wideman’s most ambitious and celebrated works, the lyrical masterpiece and PEN/Faulkner winner inspired by the 1985 police bombing of the West Philadelphia row house owned by black liberation group Move. In 1985, police bombed a West Philadelphia row house owned by the Afrocentric cult known as Move, killing eleven people and starting a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the … other houses. At the heart of Philadelphia Fire is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and who becomes obsessed with the search…

This “genre-defying mix of history, biography, and memoir” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) explores the legacy of Emmett Till’s death in relation to the fate of Till’s father, who was executed in Italy during World War II. “A searching tale of loss, recovery, and déjà vu” (The Washington Post).