Library of America Albert Murray Edition

Complete in one volume for the first time, the joyous, jazz-saturated fiction of one of our foremost African American writers, including the four-novel Scooter sequence

One of the leading cultural critics of his generation, Albert Murray was also the author of an extraordinary quartet of semi-autobiographical novels, vivid impressionistic portraits of black life in the Deep South in the 1920s and ’30s and in prewar New York City. Train Whistle Guitar (1974) introduces Murray’s recurring narrator and protagonist, Scooter, a “Southern jackrabbit raised in a briarpatch” too nimble ever to receive a scratch. Scooter’s education in books, music, and the blue-steel bent-note blues-ballad realities of American life continues in The Spyglass Tree (1991), Murray’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Tuskegee Undergraduate.” The Seven League Boots (1996) follows Scooter as he becomes a bass player in a touring band not unlike Duke Ellington’s, and The Magic Keys (2005), in which Scooter at last finds his true vocation as a writer in Greenwich Village, is an elegaic reverie on an artist’s life. Editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin round out the volume with a selection of Murray’s remarkable poems, including 11 unpublished pieces from his notebooks, and two rare examples of his work as a short story writer.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin present a definitive edition of Albert Murray’s collected nonfiction, including his 1971 memoir South to a Very Old Place, inspiration for Imani Perry’s South to America.

In his 1970 classic The Omni-Americans, Albert Murray (1916–2013) took aim at protest writers and social scientists who accentuated the “pathology” of race in American life. Against narratives of marginalization and victimhood, Murray argued that black art and culture, particularly jazz and blues, stand at the very headwaters of the American mainstream, and that much of what is best in American art embodies the “blues-hero tradition”— a heritage of grace, wit, and inspired improvisation in the face of adversity. Murray went on to refine these ideas in The Blue Devils of Nada and From the Briarpatch File, and all three landmark collections of essays are gathered here for the first time, together with Murray’s memoir South to a Very Old Place–inspiration for Imani Perry’s South to America, his brilliant lecture series The Hero and the Blues, his masterpiece of jazz criticism Stomping the Blues, and eight previously uncollected pieces.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.