African Americans - Fiction & Literature, War & Military Fiction, Character Types - Fiction

All-Night Visitors

Name: All-Night Visitors
Author: Clarence Major
ISBN: 9781555534288

by Clarence Major

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Overview

First published in 1969 in severely abridged form, Clarence Major's powerful first novel is now available in an unexpurgated paperback edition that restores the full text of his critically acclaimed and controversial work.

All-Night Visitors is the riveting, erotic, and compelling story of Eli Bolton-orphan, college dropout, Vietnam veteran, and sexual voyager-as he struggles to establish a meaningful self-identity in a chaotic and bigoted world.

About the Author, Clarence Major

CLARENCE MAJOR is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Among his numerous novels are Such Was the Season and Dirty Bird Blues. He is also the author of several works of nonfiction and volumes of poetry, including National Book Award-finalist Configurations. Bernard W. Bell is Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author of The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Richard Yarborough is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Editorials

Library Journal

Major's first novel, originally published in an expurgated edition in 1969, is finally presented intact. The disturbing story, which details the struggles of a young African American man, is filled with "violence, sex, and rage, and Major's graphic descriptions are not for the squeamish."(LJ 10/15/98)

Jerome Klinkowitz

A crucial contribution to literary history.
—Rain Taxi Review of Books

Kirkus Reviews

A new, unexpurgated edition of the 1969 Olympia Press novel that made Major (Dirty Bird Blues) a big name in Maurice Girodias' dirty-book pantheon. A classic autodidact, Major was one of those very bright young men of the 1950s who had read their way through Rimbaud long before they'd discovered Shakespeare or heard of Homer; this defiant opus, judging from its style, seems like the work of someone whose idea of the novel begins with Henry Miller and ends with Jean Genet. The book describes the experiences of Eli Bolton, a black Vietnam vet badly traumatized by the war and utterly disdainful of the white society he has returned to in America. A great part of the story takes shape as a succession of Bolton's rants, mostly concerned with his various conquests: the voracious Anita, the idealistic Cathy, the intellectual Eunice. Long descriptions of what Bolton does with Anita and Cathy and Eunice ensue, along with interpolated recollections of Vietnam and life on the streets in Chicago and New York—all written in the kind of interior patois that even Allen Ginsberg got tired of eventually ('Yeah, all kinds of battle fatigue monkeys strolling around here, bad shots hitting psychological maggie drawers all day long; I just get tired tired I keep a big funky headache all the time; lately I ain't said nothing to nobody but Dossy O, that's Cocaine which is the way my man keeps himself together'). Major offers reflections on race, politics, and society, but these are ultimately as pointless as the basic narrative—and yet less interesting. As fresh and exciting as an old Red Foxx routine, this is a good period piece for '60s junkies who don't take themselves tooseriously.