Books by Clarence Major

A quietly influential force in African American literature and art, Clarence Major makes his Penguin Classics debut with the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Dirty Bird BluesSet in post-World War II Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks, a young, harmonica-blowing blues singer who is always writing music in his head. Torn between his friendships with fellow musicians and nightclub life and his responsibilities to his wife and child, along with the pressures of dealing with a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on. He moves to Omaha with hopes of better opportunities as a blue-collar worker, but the blues in his soul and the dreams in his mind keep bringing him back to face himself. After a nightmarish descent into his own depths, Manfred emerges with fresh awareness and possibility. Through Manfred, we witness and experience the process by which modern American English has been vitalized and strengthened by the poetry and the poignancy of the African-American experience. As Manfred struggles with the oppressive constraints of society and his private turmoil, his rich inner voice resonates with the blues.

Beginning and ending in Clarence Major's atelier, My Studio demonstrates how art can influence our perception of the world, prompting "all the parts [to] coalesce into a cohesive whole." With precise and engaging imagery, Major contemplates the spaces we occupy and the "beauty in everyday things" from the familiarity of his studio.

In the first volume to collect the paintings and drawings of Clarence Major, readers are offered six decades of unique, colourful, and compelling canvases and works on paper-works of singular beauty and social relevance. These works represent Major's personal painterly journey of passionate commitment to art.

Clarence Major is a consummate artist whose work in poetry, fiction, and painting has been widely recognized. This retrospective of poems from the 1950s to the present - including selections from each of Major's previous books of poetry as well as a generous selection of new poems - creates a vivid gallery of nimbly drawn characters.

In Down and Up, Clarence Major makes use of American and European public places, their character and voice, to construct poems that explore the physical world juxtaposed sharply with the inner world. Sometimes realistic, sometimes dreamlike, these poems are dynamic, universal in theme and acknowledge a debt to the great tradition of modern American poetry.