The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger

A funky, hip, smooth-talking novel of 1960s black American culture, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger takes its hero from America to Copenhagen on a voyage of self-discovery. This “wildly comic satire of sex and race among black American expatriates in Europe, ” as Gerald Early describes the work in his introduction, follows George Washington, a.k.a. Paul Winthrop, Jr., a.k.a. Julius Makewell, or – at his bleakest – simply Efan through an odyssey that winds in and out of the beds of a variety of women – black and white, young and not-so-young. In its examination of love and lovelessness, sexuality and fatherhood, Brown’s work remains as vital an inquiry into the elements of the contemporary black man’s identity as it was when it was first published nearly three decades ago.