From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity [Hardcover]

Albert Murray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 13, 2001

In From the Briarpatch File—a gathering of erudite, provocative, and iconoclastic essays, reviews, and interviews—Albert Murray approaches contemporary America through its artistic expressions of itself and through the inventiveness of his own thinking and experience. He writes about New York in the 1920s and about the beginnings of his career as a writer. He gives us profound assessments of the achievements of Duke Ellington and William Faulkner. He outlines the responsibilities of the black educated elite and discusses the near-tragic, near-comic essence of the blues. His subject is no less than the life of America today; the clarity and the singularity of his vision, thought, and language are no less than stunning.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

A novelist, critic, and educator whose aesthetics were influenced by Kenneth Burke, Murray (The Hero and the Blues) has little use for the black arts movement and even less for critical jargon and political correctness. In this collection of book reviews, essays, and occasional addresses, he defends Eurocentrism while celebrating the unique contributions of jazz and the blues to American culture. Some of the pieces are slight, but others, like the review essays on Robert Penn Warren and Louis Armstrong, are powerful and engaging. A couple of interviews with Murray round out the volume, providing interesting details on his education at the Tuskegee Institute, his friendship with fellow alumnus Ralph Ellison, and his development as a novelist and humanist man-of-letters. Offering a nice overview of Murray, this is recommended for comprehensive collections in American and African American studies. William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Murray, a brilliant and versatile writer steeped in the classics, fairy tales, Mann, Proust, and Faulkner, has fashioned a marvelously syncopated prose style perfectly suited to his impressive insights into art and American culture. An unfettered intellectual and a boldly expressive artist, Murray combats the miasma of racism and political correctness with flair and valor in his first nonfiction book since the indelible The Blue Devils of Nada (1996). In lectures, essays, book reviews, and interviews, Murray discusses literature as "existential equipment for living" and explains that art's "primary concern" is not beauty but "the quality of human consciousness." He writes with incandescent clarity about the creative process, the significance of "aesthetic statements," and the choice each individual makes, however subconsciously, to view his or her life within a "frame of rejection" (the context for the destructive rhetoric of victimhood) or the "frame of acceptance" (the realm in which heroes are forged). Clearly Murray, bracing and refined, operates in the latter. See p.543 for a review of his poetry. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (November 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375421424
• ISBN-13: 978-0375421426
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,006,174 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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