Such Sweet Thunder

Amerigo Jones grows up poor but surrounded by love in Jazz Age Kansas City. A precocious young dreamer, he longs for the college education that his parents could not have. But as Amerigo begins to venture further away from his doting mother and father, he encounters a world marred by prejudice, where amid the bustle and the beauty, violence and injustice stalk the streets.Such Sweet Thunder is a majestic and unforgettable child's-eye-view of Jim Crow America from a powerful chronicler of American family life.



Vincent O. Carter (1924-1983) was born in Kansas City where he was raised during the Great Depression. At seventeen he was drafted into the U.S. Army and took part in the Normandy invasion. After the war, he studied English at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Carter then returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam before settling in Bern. There he wrote fiction, painted, and worked as an English teacher. He is also the author of the autobiographical The Bern Book (1973).Jesse McCarthy is an essayist, cultural critic, and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. His writing on culture and politics has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic and n+1. In 2022 he was the recipient of the Whiting Award for his essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?. His most recent book, The Blue Period, establishes Such Sweet Thunder as a work to be read and taught alongside those of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison