While serving in the military, he spent eighteen months at Dhahran Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia, where he developed an interest in the language, culture, religion, and mythology of the Arab world. It was here that he met fellow teacher and poet Eugene Redmond, forming a close collaborative relationship that would prove so integral to Dumas’s posthumous career.ĭuring his life, Dumas was active in civil rights and humanitarian efforts, including transporting food and clothing to protesters in Mississippi and Tennessee. In 1967 Dumas began work at Southern Illinois University as a teacher, counselor, and director of its 'Experiment in Higher Education' program. After leaving the Air Force, Dumas enrolled at Rutgers University but never attained a degree. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the Air Force. He always kept with him the religious and folk traditions of his hometown. He was magnetic, and he was an incredible artist'.ĭumas was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, in 1934 and lived there until the age of ten, when he moved to New York City. Toni Morrison has said 'A cult has grown up around Henry Dumas-a very deserved cult… He was brilliant. In 1968, at the age of thirty-three, he was shot and killed by a New York City Transit Authority police officer.' Dumas (JMay 23, 1968) was a writer who did not live to see most of his fiction and poetry in print. Upon his return, Dumas became active in the civil rights movement, married, had two sons, attended Rutgers University, worked for IBM, and taught at Hiram College in Ohio and at Southern Illinois University. He joined the air force in 1953 and spent a year on the Arabian Peninsula. Henry Dumas was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, in 1934 and moved to Harlem at the age of ten.

Humming with life, Dumas's stories create a collage of midcentury Black experiences, interweaving religious metaphor, African cosmologies, diasporic folklore, and America's history of slavery and systemic racism. From the Deep South to the simmering streets of Harlem, his characters embark on real, magical, and mythic quests. 'Championed by Toni Morrison and Walter Mosley, Dumas's fabulist fiction is a masterful synthesis of myth and religion, culture and nature, mask and identity. Keene, John, 1965- ( writer of introduction.). Redmond, Eugene, ( editor, writer of foreword.).

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