Born in Washington, DC in 1941, John Edgar Wideman studied at the University of Pennsylvania before going to Oxford to read for a BPhil in English Literature. He was the second African American to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar. After Oxford, Wideman returned to the US and took up a post as professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, helping to found the African American Studies Department there. He went on to be professor at the University of Wyoming, to teach at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and to be professor at Brown University. Wideman is the author of nearly 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. His first novel, A Glance Away, was published only one year after he graduated from Oxford. He is the only author to receive two PEN/Faulkner Awards, and he also received a National Book Award nomination for his memoir, Brothers and Keepers. In 2011, Wideman won the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Book Award. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 20 May 2025.
John Wideman
Pennsylvania & New College 1963
‘There was a back and forth that was hostile and intimate, about mutual vulnerabilities’
Although I was born in Washington, DC, I grew up in Pittsburgh. I am the eldest of five children. We were all close-knit. We didn’t have a choice, as it was a very small space we lived in and shared. I went to school in Homewood and in Shadyside. Homewood was a mixed urban area. Sections of it were almost entirely black or Italian, but those neighbourhoods abutted and people got along. I was used to seeing Cyrillic written on the sides of buildings because there were a lot of people who had come from Eastern Europe. So, I had a, kind of, cosmopolitan growing up, and at the same time a very segregated growing up, because most of my time was spent among other people of colour.
Early on, my mother and father made the decision that they would try to at least have a home in Shadyside, which was a partly upper-middle-class area, so we could go to better schools. That was a very difficult, because it meant higher rent and pressure on my father to earn money, but they did it, and we were the beneficiaries. In elementary school, I remember one of our teachers who taught us to sing songs which had become very popular in America, but some of them had very racist lyrics. She cared for us and we would sing these songs together, but we heard the racist messages. At the same time, we knew how to get under her skin. So, there was a back and forth that was hostile and intimate, about mutual vulnerabilities. I guess that situation prefigured much of my education, much of life in good old USA.
I liked to read and there were always books around my house. Reading was a private experience and it was my escape, a kind of protected area in a house full of kids and activity. I heard stories that were quite scary but also others that were funny, and stories about the family. I was also pretty good at telling stories. If my teachers wanted a break, sometimes they would say, ‘John, come on up. Let’s have story time. John’s going to tell us a story.’
I learned certain values in the context of family and community: the value of independence, the value of privacy, the value of property, things that belonged to you that couldn’t be violated. I wanted to find ways that I could do what I wanted to do without having other people bother me.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
I went to UPenn, and at first I wanted to major in psychology. I later changed and became an English major. I was way behind everybody because I did not have the kind of background in public schools to give me confidence that I knew what I needed to know. Penn had a good writing programme and I was encouraged. I really couldn’t say when I got the delusion of being a writer, but the more I found out about it the more it attracted me.
I had a full academic scholarship, and I also wanted to be a professional basketball player, for the independence, the power, the privacy. Becoming a Rhodes Scholar was really an accident, very last minute. I think it was my mentor in the English department who mentioned it to me. I was very cocky in some ways, but I was also blighted by coming up as a young man of colour. I was blighted practically because of the inferior exposure to the educational system and also blighted in terms of attitude. I didn’t have role models, so whatever brashness I had was undercut by a kind of fear. I remember the shock and euphoria of finding out I’d been selected as a Rhodes Scholar. I wanted to win something. I hadn’t really thought about what it meant and where it might take me.
‘I just wanted to be a great writer’
Going to Oxford, going to Europe, was going to another world. It was a different way of living, another language. I mean, I spoke the language that was of my community and then I was taught the language of the majority in America so I could speak and not sound like a coloured kid. But then, learning the English of the English was a whole other jump and that was fun and interesting. When I think back on Oxford, there were many exhilarating experiences but just as many disappointments. But I loved the beer cellar and I also continued with sports, and that was great fun. I had a cross-section of friends – sports players and people who wrote books eventually – so it was an enormously rich experience.
I studied English, with a focus on the eighteenth century. I was interested in questions of technique as much as I was in a period per se, and the eighteenth century happens to be the time that the English novel took its classic form. I started sharing things I’d written, and I showed one story to one of my tutors and he said I should write about something closer to home. I thought that was demeaning. I thought it was a way of saying, ‘Hey, you’re African American, write about the ghetto, or write about oppression.’ I just wanted to be a great writer. But his advice penetrated, the idea that I needed to write about things which belong to me in a very intense and emotional and inseparable way.
‘I was figuring it out story by story, sentence by sentence’
Right after Oxford, I went to Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I learned a lot and I had fun, but I was also beginning to feel a little bit itchy about finding a professional niche. So, when the opportunity to teach at Penn arose, I went there. I was still thinking I could play basketball and have a, kind of, combined career alongside a teaching job.
I still felt that I was playing catch-up, trying to translate a very personal experience into some mode or some medium that both allowed me to express it and maybe share it with people for whom it would be something new. I was figuring it out story by story, sentence by sentence, looking for authorities, books and writers who would help me. The idea that my mother’s speech, my father’s speech, the stories I had heard growing up were a powerful eternal source that was available didn’t even occur to me. This is where racism is such an insidious and pervasive evil, because I was dominated by white writers and I was not familiar with black writers, and that’s how my career was talked about by critics. But that’s an oversimplified story of my writing’s development. At some point, I became aware of a black tradition, and that to some extent is true, but to critique my writing only on that basis shortcuts and deprives it of so much else I was learning.
My first story was published while I was at Penn. I was very grateful to get a foot in the door and that was an advantage for me, but also a disadvantage, because a lot of people would have said, ‘Oh, he’s just a token,’ and that hasn’t changed at all, that inability for people to get outside their own skin and their own background. That’s what art attempts. I think that’s one reason we put up with our artists. Occasionally, art wrenches us out of our certainties.
‘Maybe the beauty of art is it allows you to have it both ways’
On one level, as a writer, I’m like a kid in a sandbox, doing my own thing, minding my own business, and I just totally couldn’t care less what’s happening in the rest of the world.
On the other hand, I know I have an audience. I feel a sense of responsibility, where writers should be part of the world’s fight. But it’s a struggle. Some days, I feel we’ve gone too far and screwed things up beyond the point of no return, and I mean politics, I mean gender relations, I mean race relations, I mean climate. Other days, I feel, ‘Forget about it.’ Maybe the beauty of art is it allows you to have it both ways. We can do what the hell we want to do and that doesn’t exclude other people. It maybe even includes them or makes them grow.