SOURCE: Gysin, Fritz. “John Edgar Wideman's ‘Fever’.” Callaloo 22, no. 3 (summer 1999): 715-26.

In the following essay, Gysin provides historical background to Wideman's “Fever” as well as a stylistic analysis of the story.

“Telling the story right will make it read.”

(Damballah)

“Certain things had to have happened for any of it to make sense.”

(Philadelphia Fire)

“Fever” is the title story of a book that heralds Wideman's imaginative return to Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love,” whose hypocritical failure to fulfill that promise in the 20th century he had already tried to expose in The Lynchers (1973) before he had found his unique voice in a series of novels located in his native Pittsburgh, especially The Homewood Trilogy (1985). It is under heavy personal pressure that Wideman wrote Reuben (1987), his novel about a black outsider who becomes a lawyer to the poor in Pittsburgh, and then published Fever [Fever: Twelve Stories...