Man Who Cried I Am

Summary: In the harsh segregated America of the 1940s, where the brave southern Civil Rights movement has lead to brutal white retaliations, Max Reddick, a black journalist & novelist, is dying of cancer & self-hate. Reddick recalls his life on a journey toward revelation & revolution. He struggles to find his place in white institutions such as big-city newsrooms, publishers' offices, & even the White House, where he strove ...daily to retain the tenuous favor of his white employers. He struggles to find love, first with Lillian Patch, an average, middle-class Afro-American woman, but ultimately with Margrit, a white Dutch woman. He struggles to find a future place for the black writer in America & meets Harry Ames, a successful Richard Wright-like novelist, poet, & revolutionary. But his greatest struggle is for the future survival of the black species itself as he learns of the government's "final solution" to "the Negro problem." The Man Who Cried I Am, first published in 1967, is the fourth of 17 books by John A. Williams. [read more]