The Man Who Cried I Am: A Novel

With a foreword by Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America's racial fault lines

Max Reddick, a Black American writer--a gifted novelist, a journalist, and a presidential speechwriter--has spent his career fighting against the racism of white elites and the Blacks who have been coopted by their liberal positions. Now terminally ill, Reddick has nothing to lose. This novel takes place in a single day in May 1964 in Amsterdam and Leiden but through Max's memories charts his journey through the 1940s and 50s, from New York to his expatriation in Paris, Amsterdam, and Africa, as he considers who he was, who he is, and who he might yet become.

Having left the relative comfort of a hospital bed in New York, Max is back in Europe to settle an old debt with his white Dutch wife, and to pay homage to his friend, rival, and mentor, the late writer Harry Ames, loosely modelled on Richard Wright. There, he comes into possession of secret documents among Harry's papers, which detail the "King Alfred" plan, a plot involving the National Security Council, the FBI, the CIA, and the President of the United States to "terminate, once and for all," the threat represented by Black Americans in the event of widespread racial unrest. Understanding at last that Harry has been murdered, Max springs into action in a self-defining moment, delivering the documents to a Malcolm X-like figure, Minister Q, at considerable risk to his own personal safety.

Few novels have so deliberately blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality as The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and many of its early readers assumed the King Alfred plan was real. In her introduction, Merve Emre examines the gonzo marketing plan behind the novel that fueled this confusion and prompted an FBI investigation. This deluxe paperback also includes a new foreword by novelist Ishmael Reed.

"It is a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb . . . . This is a book white people are not ready to read yet, neither are most black people who read. But [it] is the milestone produced since Native Son. Besides which, and where I should begin, it is a damn beautifully written book." --Chester Himes

"Magnificent . . . obviously in the Baldwin and Ellison class." --John Fowles

"If The Man Who Cried I Am were a painting it would be done by Brueghel or Bosch. The madness and the dance is never-ending display of humanity trying to creep past inevitable Fate." --Walter Mosely