Albert Murray, Essayist Who Challenged the Conventional, Dies at 97

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Albert Murray, an influential essayist, critic and novelist who found literary inspiration in his Alabama roots and saw black culture and American culture as inextricably entwined, died on Sunday at his home in Harlem. He was 97.

With a freewheeling prose style influenced by jazz and the blues, Mr. Murray challenged conventional assumptions about art, race and American identity in books like the essay collection “Stomping the Blues” and the memoir “South to a Very Old Place.” He also gave expression to those views in a series of autobiographical novels, starting with “Train Whistle Guitar” in 1974.





Mr. Murray established himself as a formidable social and literary figure in 1970 with his first book, a collection of essays titled “The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture.” The book constituted an attack on black separatism, a movement supported by the Black Panthers and others that was gathering force in the late 1960s, particularly among alienated young blacks.

“The United States is not a nation of black and white people,” Mr. Murray, a fervent integrationist, wrote. “Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.” America, he maintained, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts,” was a “nation of multicolored people,” or Omni-Americans: “part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian — and part Negro.”


read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/books/albert-murray-essayist-who-challenged-the-conventional-dies-at-97.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0


Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison



Hyphens, Heroes, & Dragons: Conversation with Albert Murray - Auburn University - Apr 16, 2008

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1. sorry, AM . . .

"Critics? Man, most critics feel that unless brownskin U. S. writers are pissing and moaning about injustice they have nothing to say. In any case, it seems that they find it much easier to praise such writers for being angry (which requires no talent, not to mention genius) than for being innovative or insightful."


http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1996/autumn/pinsker-albert-murray/