John Edgar Wideman was born in Washington, D.C., in 1941. Shortly before his first birthday, the family moved to Homewood, an Adrican-American community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that has been the locale of much of his fiction. He attended Peabody High, one of Pittsburgh’s best secondary schools. There, he excelled in his studies as well as in sports.

 He was awarded a Benjamin Franklin Scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania, where he won a creative writing prize and earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He also won all-Ivy League status as a forward on the basketball team and successfully competed on the track team. In 1963, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and spent the year at Oxford University’s New Collect, where he received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree.

 Returning to the United States he began his writing carrer with A Glance Away [1967]. His novels include Hurry Home [1970], Hiding Place [1981], Sent for you Yesterday [1984], Philadelphia Fire [1990], The Cattle Killing [1996], and Two Cities [1998]. His short story collections include Damballah [1981], Fever [1989], The Stories of John Edgar Wideman [1992], and All Stories Are True [1993]. He is also the author of a memoir, Brothers and Keepers [1996] and numerous essays.

 Mr. Wideman has been honored with many awards including the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (twice: once for Sent for you Yesterday and a second time for Philadelphia Fire); the American Book Award, the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction; a MacArthur Foundation Fellows Award; and the National Magazine Editors Prize for Short Fiction, among others.

 According to The New York Times, in its review of The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, “Any American fiction writer who sets the bulk of his work in the same place, or who draws repeatedly on the same characters, inevitably faces comparison with William Faulkner. With John Edgar Wideman’s inner city Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood, that comparison is particularly apt.”

The 1998 Rea Award Jurors Grace Paley, Tim O’Brien, and Gina Berriault, cited Wideman’s work thus:

“Profoundly honest, eloquently impassioned, the stories of John Edgar Wideman guide us to a place we’ve never been, into that unexplored area of America’s Heartland for which we’ve had no true compass before his own. More than compassionate, Wideman’s stories are like gospel songs sung by a hundred voices, offering praise to life itself.”

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