Former English Professor John A. Williams Dies at Age 89

Rutgers University | Noted author and former Professor John A Williams, who taught at Rutgers University–Newark from 1979 to 1994 and whose distinguished and prolific career earned him the American Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the National Literary Hall of Fame, has died.

Williams career spanned 30 years and multiple genres, including fiction, travel books, biographies, and picture-histories for adult and young-adult readers. He emerged onto the American literary scene in 1960 with his first novel, The Angry Ones. He caught the attention of critics a year later with his second novel, Night Song, which painted a vivid portrait of the jazz world of Greenwich Village, in New York City. But it was his fourth work of fiction, The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), that established Williams as a major force in American and African-American literature.