Such Sweet Thunder

Such Sweet Thunder immerses readers in the life of a precocious infant, Amerigo Jones, and then tells the story of his first eighteen years as he becomes aware of the world, starts school, then begins to learn about and experience adult issues, from racism and crime to falling in love.All the while, in one of the most moving homages to parents ever to appear in literature, Amerigo is protected by Viola and Rutherford, who are loving and, mostly, even-tempered, but also desperately young - teenagers themselves when Amerigo is born - and poor. With a new foreword by Jesse McCarthy, Carter's literary masterpiece is poised to take its rightful place in the American literary canon.



Vincent O. Carter was born in Kansas City in 1924. At seventeen he was drafted into the US Army, and took part in the Normandy invasion. After the war, he attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Wayne State in Detroit, then returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam before settling in Bern, where he died in 1983. He is also the author of The Bern Book, reissued by Dalkey Archive Press in 2022.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