Goodbye, Sweetwater: New and Selected Stories

9780938410591

0938410598

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.