{Read} {PDF EPUB} ~download Beetlecreek by William Demby Beetlecreek by William Demby. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 655bd99ecc2b15fc • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Beetlecreek by William Demby. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 655bd99ee8c50d36 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. User Search limit reached - please wait a few minutes and try again. In order to protect Biblio.com from unauthorized automated bot activity and allow our customers continual access to our services, we may limit the number of searches an individual can perform on the site in a given period of time. We try to be as generous as possible, but generally attempt to limit search frequency to that which would represent a typical human's interactions. If you are seeing this message, please wait a couple of minutes and try again. If you think that you've reached this page in error, please let us know at [email protected]. If you are an affiliate, and would like to integrate Biblio search results into your site, please contact [email protected] for information on accessing our inventory APIs. Can you guess which first edition cover the image above comes from? What was Dr. Seuss’s first published book? Take a stab at guessing and be entered to win a $50 Biblio gift certificate! Read the rules here. Beetlecreek;: A novel. Publisher: Chatham Bookseller, U.S.A. Publication Date: 1972. Binding: Hardcover. Book Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket as Issued. Edition: Reissue. About this title. After several years of silence and seclusion in Beetlecreek's black quarter, a carnival worker named Bill Trapp befriends Johnny Johnson, a Pittsburgh teenager living with relatives in Beetlecreek. Bill is white. Johnny is black. Both are searching for acceptance, something that will give meaning to their lives. Bill tries to find it through good will in the community. Johnny finds it in the Nightriders, a local gang. David Diggs, the boy's dispirited uncle, aspires to be an artist but has to settle for sign painting. David and Johnny's new friendship with Bill kindles hope that their lives will get better. David's marriage has failed; his wife's shallow faith serves as her outlet from racial and financial oppression. David's unhappy routine is broken by Edith Johnson's return to Beetlecreek, but this relationship will be no better than his loveless marriage. Bill's attempts to unify black and white children with a community picnic is a disaster. A rumor scapegoats him as a child molester, and Beetlecreek is titillated by the imagined crimes. This novel portraying race relations in a remote West Virginia town has been termed an existential classic. It would be hard, said The New Yorker , to give Mr. Demby too much praise for the skill with which he has maneuvered the relationships in this book. During the 1960s Arna Bontemps wrote, "Demby's troubled townsfolk of the West Virginia mining region foreshadow present dilemmas. The pressing and resisting social forces in this season of our discontent and the fatal paralysis of those of us unable or unwilling to act are clearly anticipated with the dependable second sight of a true artist." First published in 1950, Beetlecreek stands as a moving condemnation of provincialism and fundamentalism. Both a critique of racial hypocrisy and a new direction for the African-American novel, it occupies fresh territory that is neither the ghetto realism of Richard Wright nor the ironic modernism of Ralph Ellison. Even after fifty years, more or less, William Demby said in 1998, "It still seems to me that Beetlecreek is about the absence of symmetry in human affairs, the imperfectibility of justice the tragic inevitability of mankind's inhumanity to mankind." William Demby is the author of The Catacombs and Love Story: Black . He lives in Sag Harbor, N. Y. James C. Hall, a professor of African- American Studies and English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, is the author of the forthcoming book, Mercy, Mercy, Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties , and editor of Langston Hughes: A Collection of Poems . From the Inside Flap: A novel in which there is candid treatment of desperate isolation in a small town's black quarter. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. All sales are net. Prepayment is required. Postage in US: Items will be sent at Book Rate unless Priority Mail is requested; $4.00 for the first item (Book Rate), or $6.00 for Priority Mail, $1.50 for each additional book. Postage for unusually heavy or valuable books may be more. Please contact us for international postage rates. Books may be returned within 30 days of the Estimated Delivery Date. Credit cards accepted: VISA, MC, AMEX, Discover. The Chatham Bookseller, LLC is a limited liabilit. Shipping costs are based on books weighing 2.2 LB, or 1 KG. If your book order is heavy or oversized, we may contact you to let you know extra shipping is required. Beetlecreek. The world’s #1 eTextbook reader for students. VitalSource is the leading provider of online textbooks and course materials. More than 15 million users have used our Bookshelf platform over the past year to improve their learning experience and outcomes. With anytime, anywhere access and built-in tools like highlighters, flashcards, and study groups, it’s easy to see why so many students are going digital with Bookshelf. titles available from more than 1,000 publishers. customer reviews with an average rating of 9.5. digital pages viewed over the past 12 months. institutions using Bookshelf across 241 countries. Beetlecreek by William Demby and Publisher University Press of Mississippi. Save up to 80% by choosing the eTextbook option for ISBN: 9781617030864, 1617030864. The print version of this textbook is ISBN: 9781578061068, 1578061067. Beetlecreek by William Demby and Publisher University Press of Mississippi. Save up to 80% by choosing the eTextbook option for ISBN: 9781617030864, 1617030864. The print version of this textbook is ISBN: 9781578061068, 1578061067. William Demby: Interview. As novelist William Demby left the podium on the stage at the Cleveland Playhouse after addressing a nearly full auditorium, the audience showered him with an enthusiastic ovation. The outpouring of admiration was both gratifying and otherworldly to Demby who has lived mostly outside the margins of the American literary world since his acclaimed first novel, Beetlecreek , appeared in 1950. “That applause was something I had not experienced,” the 84-year-old Demby said over the telephone earlier this year from his home in Sag Harbor, New York. Demby received a lifetime achievement award at the 71 st annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards on September 7, last year in Cleveland. Anisfield-Wolf honors works of fiction and non-fiction that promote racial understanding and cultural diversity. A nifty $10,000 check accompanied the award. “When they first called me to tell me I had won that award,” Demby said, “I thought it was a mistake.” The only mistake was that no one had bothered to give him a writing award until last year. Why would one of the most singularly talented African-American writers to emerge in the second half of the 20 th century have to wait fifty-six years from the publication of his debut novel to receive his first writing award? The vagaries of fame, fortune, and literary institutions don’t completely explain it. Other factors contributed to his relative obscurity: He has lived in Italy for about half of his adult life; he has published only four novels; and his work defies conventional literary categories. Born in Pittsburgh and raised in Clarksville, West Virginia, Demby attended West Virginia State, where he studied with poet-novelist Margaret Walker until World War II intervened. He joined the U.S. Army in 1942 and was stationed in Italy where he wrote for the military newspaper Stars & Stripes . After the war, he earned a B.A. degree at Fisk University in Nashville. He returned to Italy to study art in Rome and soon decided to make writing his career and Italy his home. He married an Italian writer, Lucia Drudi, and they had a son, James, now a classical music composer and conductor living in Italy. Demby wrote Beetlecreek at a time when the black protest novel was in vogue. But instead of portraying white society’s injustices to blacks, as Richard Wright, Chester Himes and many other black writers did, Demby created a story about a reclusive outcast white man who is victimized by the nearby black town of Beetlecreek, West Virginia. The overwhelming desire for conformity and social acceptance among Beetlecreek residents engenders a stifling, stale atmosphere that discourages meaningful action and thought. But few of the town’s residents comprehend the sense of paralysis that grips the town, and even fewer try to break away from it. After Beetlecreek , Demby became stricken with a creative paralysis of his own and didn’t publish another novel for fifteen years. But he submerged himself in the burgeoning post-war Italian cultural scene and earned a comfortable living translating movie scripts from Italian into English for marketing purposes. He worked for legendary directors like Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, and the master of the spaghetti western, Sergio Leone, as well as the directors of the more commercial action films. He even acted in a 1952 potboiler entitled Il Peccata di Anna ( Sin of Anna ), playing a murder victim. “They all came to me to translate scripts because I could do it in lightning speed,” Demby said. “Whenever there was something I didn’t understand in Italian, I would invent something. They laughed about it.” Seeking ideas for a novel, Demby began reading more than a dozen newspapers a day. He clipped and saved both significant and trivial news stories that interested him. Inspired by Italian collage artist friends, he began creating, in his words, “a literary collage.” Demby merged fictional events with the real events occurring in his life as he wrote his second novel, The Catacombs . He sprinkled the novel with headlines and excerpts from newspaper clippings, providing a historical context as well as comical juxtapositions. “I got interested in abstract art and the fragmentation of time and place,” he said. “I challenged myself to write a novel like that.” In The Catacombs , Demby cast himself as the narrator and one of the primary characters–a black American writer searching for his elusive muse as he lives in his adopted country, Italy, and revisits the United States. Demby, his family members, and his friends interact in the novel with the two main fictional characters, a young black woman named Doris and an Italian count. Published in 1965, The Catacombs is an innovative work, one of the most powerful American novels of that turbulent decade. Although it resonates with the political tensions of the early ’60s, it also dramatizes the timeless struggles of the human spirit. It was so personal in topic and tone that Demby says he couldn’t bear to read the manuscript in its entirety from beginning to end before sending it to the publisher. “It was too frightening,” he said. “You noticed the rhythms and coincidences that were coming from the deepest recesses of your imagination.” The Catacombs reflects Demby’s decision to avoid the conventional treatment of racial issues. He writes about race in a highly personal, individualistic manner, a fresh perspective shaped by his own aesthetic and his partly European sensibility. As a result, Demby never became a part of the black arts movement of the ’60s and ’70s, which tended to portray racial issues in a narrow, politicized way. “At one point, I had wanted to be like the black writers of the earlier times,” he said. “But if I did that, I told myself, I would be a minstrel man.” He moved to New York City in the mid-1960s to work for an advertising agency as a copy writer. He says he received important assignments and he found the work exciting. In 1969, Demby became an English professor at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island, a position he held until he retired in 1987. He says he was never tempted to include his own novels in his classes. “I didn’t think I could do that,” he said. “I did not want to explain what I tried to do.” His third novel, Love Story Black , was published in 1978. It concerns a Demby-like persona, a middle-aged black male writer in New York City named Bill Edwards who is assigned to research and write a magazine story about Mona Pariss, a once-famous elderly black singer who is living her last years on welfare in a run-down tenement building. Edwards encounters unforeseen obstacles while trying to plumb Pariss’ inscrutable past. With Pariss playing the role of muse much like Doris did in The Catacombs , Edwards’ odyssey leads him to profound discoveries, not only about the elderly woman’s life, but also about disturbing truths concerning race and sex in America. Love Story Black is a highly satirical novel packed with scenes that are uproariously funny. Demby calls this his favorite among his novels. “It’s the most challenging,” he said. “It involves mysteries I don’t understand, mysteries about youth, sex and aging.” Demby’s fourth novel, Blueboy , is so obscure and scarce that he’s never even seen it in its published form. He wrote it quickly in the late 1970s to fulfill a requirement for his academic career. He presented the manuscript to his English Department. Before long, he received reported sightings of this novel, which, according to Amazon.com, was published in 1980 by Knopf Paperbacks. “When I was going to college at Fisk, Blueboy was a name we often gave to a young guy who was very black and kind of doltish,” Demby said. “I imagined this character coming out of a reform school being something like that.” The novel focuses on the friendship this character strikes up with another teenage boy from a very dissimilar background. “It seems to me that near the end of the novel, there was a riot involving old people somewhere in New Jersey,” he said, laughing. He still has no idea how it was published. “I’m glad the novel’s going around,” he said. “I don’t mind. I like mysteries.” Demby’s first wife died in 1995. He’s now married to Barbara Morris, a friend from his college days he reconnected with after his wife’s death. Demby splits time between his Sag Harbor home and a villa in the mountains outside Florence, Italy, that his first wife inherited from her family. In recent years, he and his son have organized an annual classical music festival at the villa. Still active at the age of 84, Demby recently finished his fifth novel, King Comus . The novel investigates the historic relationship between blacks and Jews. Demby hasn’t found a publisher for it yet. Even during the long stretches of his life when he wasn’t writing novels, the creative side of his personality remained fertile and he continued thinking like a writer. “Once you understand that the world is never what you are presented with, that if you turn a corner, you’re going to be presented with an entirely new world,” he said, “that has always and continues to excite me. I like to take chances and imagine other worlds. That is probably the deepest and most influential characteristic of human beings–imagining the life around them and wondering about the magic of the life of others.” That’s why he’s never agonized about being underappreciated. That’s also why he could smile at the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards last year when a middle-aged woman asked him to autograph her copy of Love Story Black and said, “I just love this novel. Why didn’t I hear of you before?”