Love Story Black - by William Demby (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This "thoroughly engaging" third novel by the author of Beetlecreek ("[a] quiet masterpiece" --Kirkus Reviews) follows a Black journalist in the 1970s whose bourgeois life is turned upside down by the subject of his writing assignment.

Edwards, a freelance writer and Black Studies professor at a small college in New York City, is assigned a story for New Black Woman magazine: a profile of Mona Pariss, an aging former singer whose popularity in Europe once rivaled Josephine Baker's. With his creditors at the door, Professor Edwards beats a path to the crumbling Harlem apartment house where Mona Pariss, once the toast of Europe for her singing, now lives in squalid obscurity. As his interviews progress, Edwards is gradually drawn into Mona's strange, mystical world. At the same time, he finds himself entering into an affair with a beautiful assistant at New Black Woman magazine. Ultimately he becomes entangled in the lives of both women and nearly loses himself in the process.

About the Author

William Demby was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on December 25, 1922 and attended college in Clarksburg, West Virginia, before enlisting in World War II and serving in Italy. He graduated from Fisk University in 1947 then moved abroad to Rome, where he spent the next two decades working as a novelist, journalist, and script translator and screenwriter for the Italian cinema. In the late 1960s, Demby joined the faculty at The College of Staten Island, dividing his time between the United States and Italy. His works include Beetlecreek (1950), The Catacombs (1965), Love Story Black (1978), and King Comus (2017). In 2006, he was the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died in Sag Harbor, New York, in 2013.