Albert Murray

Albert Murray

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"The only way to appreciate the music of Murray's prose is to immerse yourself in long passages of dialogue, monologues, and lyric description of countryside and fireside, which are nothing so much as the rich end choruses of a blues artist translated into speech and action." -John Edgar Wideman, The New York Times Book Review

A critic, novelist, and biographer, Murray was born in Nokomis, Alabama in 1916. He attended the Tuskegee Institute in the early 1940s, and after a year of graduate studies at NYU, he divided his time between teaching at Tuskegee and serving in the air force. His writing career began in earnest in 1962, when he retired from the military. His first book THE OMNI-AMERICANS (1977, Avon Books) was critically acclaimed.

The cofounder of Jazz at Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis, he is also the author of THE BLUE DEVILS OF NADA (1996, Pantheon Books), THE SEVEN LEAGUE BOOTS(1996, Pantheon Books), and TRAIN WHISTLE GUITAR (1989, Norteastern University Press).

Murray Photo: Lynda Koolish, African American Writers: Portraits and Visions

Conjugations and Reiterations
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Format: Hardcover, 80pp.
ISBN: 0375421416
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Pub. Date: November 2001

"...In Conjugations and Reiterations. The poems sings, literally sings off the pages. Poems that immediately establish the rhythm and earthiness of the blues, with the soulful yearnings of gospel music with the concrete reality of history, living and loving. Murray pays tribute to the jazz greats, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. Murray examines Freud and turns the spotlight on William Faulkner, his writings. I don’t expect the range of mental musings, a pleasant surprise. Conjugations and Reiterations is remarkable!" ~Thumper AALBC.com

Train Whistle Guitar
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Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 208pp.
ISBN: 0375703365
Publisher: Random House, Incorporated
Pub. Date: November 1998
Edition Desc : 1 VINTAGE

Murray's coming-of-age story set in 1920s Alabama is the first in a trilogy of novels that includes The Spyglass Tree and The Seven League Boots

The Spyglass Tree
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Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 207pp.
ISBN: 0679730850
Publisher: Random House, Incorporated
Pub. Date: October 1992
Edition Desc : 1st Vintage International ed

This is a sequel to Train Whistle Guitar (BRD 1974), Murray's autobiographical novel about Scooter, a young black growing up in Alabama during the 1920s. It is the 1930s and Scooter is at college. "The chinaberry tree that served as Scooter's spyglass lookout in the earlier novel has been replaced here by an attic dorm room, 'above but never apart' from campus life and the world beyond. Here James Joyce and Duke Ellington and Uncle Remus stand on an equal footing, as Scooter labors to match what he learns against what he knows and loves." (Newsweek)