Clarence Major

(1936-      ) 

Clarence Major, poet, novelist, and painter,  was born in 1936 in Atlanta, Georgia. He received a B.S. from the State University of New York and a Ph.D. from the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities.

His books of poetry include Configurations: New & Selected Poems, 1958-1998 (1999); Parking Lots (1992); Some Observations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the Century (1998); Surfaces and Masks (1987); Inside Diameter: The France Poems (1985); Symptoms and Madness (1971); Swallow the Lake (1970); and Fires That Burn in Heaven (1954).

He is the author of more than eight novels including Dirty Bird Blues: A Novel (1996); Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar (1988); Fun and Games (1988); Such Was the Season (1987); Emergency Exit (1979), and Reflex and Bone Structure (1975).

Recent prose offerings included Trips: A Memoir (2001) and Afterthought: Essays and Criticism (2000). he is also the editor of many anthologies and books such as The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African American Poetry (1995); Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (1994); and The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work. Among his many honors and awards are a Western States Book Award for Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a National Council on the Arts Fellowship. Clarence Major is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis

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All-Night Visitors (1969)

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."
—Library Journal

A new, unexpurgated edition of the 1969 Olympia Press novel that made Major (Dirty Bird Blues, 1996, etc.) a big name in Maurice Girodias's 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 Yorkall 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 too seriously.

—Kirkus Reviews

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