Along with such writers as Cecil Brown, Ronald Fair, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Ishmael Reed, and Charles Wright, Barry Beckham has helped to change the shape and tone of contemporary Afro-American fiction. Breaking with the realistic and naturalistic modes of fiction that characterized black American writing into the 1950s and continue to predominate today, each of Beckham's books, especially his 1972 novel Runner Mack, is marked by stylistic innovation and the author's ability to hold the comic and the pathetic in equipoise.

Born in West Philadelphia in 1944, Beckham moved with his mother to Atlantic City, New Jersey, when he was nine. The new home would leave its imprint on the novelist's imagination. Atlantic City was, he recalls, "a strange place" in which to grow up, yet one rich in a variety of black cultures and social strata. Established jazz musicians came regularly to Atlantic City as did black entertainers, so...