System of Dante's Hell

"Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age . . . the special agony of the American Negro." --New York Times Book Review

"A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno. . . . Other writers addressed race more directly, but for all its linguistic slipperiness, Baraka's language conveys the feelings of fear, violation, and fury with a surprising potency. A pungent and lyrical portrait of mid-'60s black protest." --Kirkus Reviews

With a new introduction by Woodie King Jr.

This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, treachery. With a poet's skill, Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul--lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.