Such Sweet Thunder: A Novel

Vincent O. Carter

dek, 2014 · Steerforth

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Set in Kansas City, Missouri, during the Jazz Age of the 1920s and ’30s, Such Sweet Thunder is a majestic evocation of childhood and parental love told through the eyes of a remarkable boy, Amerigo Jones. This vivid portrait of an era marred by racial segregation and relentless, daily injustices is nonetheless rendered with love and longing for a time and place that was enriched by a vibrant, burgeoning, and widely influential African American culture and a fierce feeling for family and community.

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VINCENT O. CARTER was born in Kansas City in 1924. At seventeen he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He landed on a Normandy beachhead and took part in the drive toward Paris. Back in the United States, he earned a college degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and spent a graduate year at Wayne State in Detroit. Eventually he returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam before settling in Bern, where he spent the rest of his life in a sort of self-imposed exile. His only work published during his lifetime was The Bern Book: A Record of the Voyage of the Mind (1973), a memoir of his life in the Swiss capital during the 1950s. He completed a draft manuscript for Such Sweet Thunder in 1963. Despite receiving enthusiastic support from some in the literary world, the manuscript did not deliver what publishers expected from “Negro literature” at the time, and after enduring a round of rejections Carter shelved the project. He died in Bern in 1983.