A major literary figure tells "a searching tale of loss, recovery, and deja vu that is part memoir and what-if speculation, part polemic and exposé" (
The Washington Post) about two generations of one family--civil rights martyr Emmett Till and his father, Louis--shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Emmett Till took a train from his home in Chicago to visit family in Money, Mississippi; a few weeks later he returned home dead. Murdered because he was a colored boy and had, allegedly, whistled at a white woman. His mother, Mamie Till, chose to display her son's brutalized face in a glass-topped casket, "so the world can see what they did to my baby."
Emmett Till's murder and his mother's refusal to allow his story to be forgotten have become American legends. But one darkly significant twist in the Till legend is rarely mentioned: Louis Till, Emmett's father, Mamie's husband, a soldier during World War II, was executed in Italy for committing rape and murder.
In 1955, when he and Emmett were each only fourteen years old, Wideman saw a horrific photograph of dead Emmett's battered face. Decades later, upon discovering that Louis Till had been court-martialed and hanged, he was impelled to investigate the tragically intertwined fates of father and son.
Writing to Save a Life is "part exploration and part meditation, a searching account of [Wideman's] attempt to learn more about the short life of Louis Till" (
The New York Times Book Review) and shine light on the truths that have remained in darkness.
Wideman, the author of the award-winning
Brothers and Keepers, "is a master of quiet meditation...and his book is remarkable for its insight and power" (
SFGate). An amalgam of research, memoir, and imagination,
Writing to Save a Life is essential and "impressive" (
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) reading--an engaging, enlightening conversation between generations, the living and the dead, fathers and sons.
"A quietly harrowing postscript to the tragedy of Emmett Till [and] a searching account of [Wideman's] attempt to learn more about the short life of Louis Till."
--New York Times Book Review
"Wideman is one of the great prose stylists of contemporary American fiction, a master of parallel fragments and the question-as-statement."
--Bookforum
"[Wideman is] a towering figure in American literature... one cannot deny the force of Wideman's vision and the measure of his grief and moral concern. The great body of work that he has gifted us carries voices and memories from the past into our present."
--The Nation
"Brilliant and ultimately ferocious."
--Dallas Morning News
"Haunting."
--New York Magazine
"A provocative mix of nonfiction and imagined scenes ... [Wideman] shines a light on Emmett's little-known father."
--Newsday
"Reading Writing to Save a Life is to ride shotgun in [Wideman's] tricked-out time machine to a familiar destination: the jagged fault lines of America's racial divide."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Forty-nine years after the publication of his first book, Mr. Wideman has forged 'Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, ' perhaps his most impressive armament so far ... A challenge to ... rise up, open the door and see the shared humanity that some have worked so hard to disguise. That is the key to John Wideman's writing and it is our responsibility to seize it in the hope of saving a life, be it an African-American man shot repeatedly for no reason or our own."
--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"A genre-defying mix of history, biography, and memoir that explores the role of race in the 1945 court-martial of Louis Till, a 23-year-old soldier who was executed for rape and murder while serving in Italy."
--Philadelphia Inquirer
"Captivating ... Wideman revives an incredibly disturbing but largely forgotten detail from the Emmett Till affair ... Like a forensic defense attorney, [Wideman] interrogate[s] the file from every possible angle: the questions not asked, the abridged statements and translations, the mystery of Louis Till's silence about his own guilt or innocence."
--Mother Jones
