The twentieth century, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote in a 1996 profile, “is Albert Murray’s century; we just live in it.” Few writers have penetrated as deeply into the complexities of race and culture in America as did Murray in such indispensable books as The Omni-Americans and Stomping the Blues. But his literary élan, wit, and sense of exhilarating play found its fullest expression in his novels, a semi-autobiographical tetralogy published to great acclaim over some thirty years and here collected for the first time in a single volume.

Deeply engaged with the modernist legacy of writers such as Faulkner and Joyce, and with the work of his great friend Ralph Ellison, Murray’s four novels form a wise and rollicking “memory book,” mining his own history to fashion an indelible portrait of life in the Deep South in the 1920s and ’30s and in prewar New York City. His narrator and protagonist, Scooter, is introduced in Train Whistle Guitar (1974), a novel about a boy’s upbringing in a blue-collar African American community in which he learns as much from musicians and wise elders as he does in school. Murray extends his tale of Scooter’s youth—an education in books, music, and the bent-note-blues realities of American life—in The Spyglass Tree (1991), his portrait of the artist as a Tuskegee undergraduate. The Seven League Boots (1996) goes on to tell the story of Scooter’s tenure as a bass player in a touring band not unlike Duke Ellington’s. In the final novel The Magic Keys (2005), Murray’s hero at last finds his true vocation as a writer in Greenwich Village, in a tale that, in the words of John Leonard, is at once “elegy, reverie, . . . and musical score.”

The volume is rounded out with a selection of Murray’s remarkable poems—potent verbal firecrackers in the form of blues lyrics, gospel hymns, barbershop aphorisms, and high-modernist word portraits, including eleven published here for the first time. An appendix features two stories bookending Murray’s career as a fiction writer: “The Luzanna Cholly Kick” (1953), the first published iteration of what would become Train Whistle Guitar, and the previously unpublished story “Manifest Destiny U.S.A.” (2004–5), a tantalizing glimpse at an offshoot to the Scooter novels.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., co-editor, is the Alphonse Fletcher University professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An Emmy Award–winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Gates has authored or co-authored twenty-two books and created eighteen documentary films.

Paul Devlin, co-editor, is Assistant Professor of English at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. He is the editor of Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues (2016) and Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones, as told to Albert Murray (2011), a finalist for the Jazz Journalists Association Book Award. He is the book review editor of African American Review.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by the Ford Foundation, Charlie Davidson, Crystal McCrary & Raymond J. McGuire, Lewis & Kristin Jones, Sidney Offit, and Douglas E. Schoen and by the administration, faculty, staff, and alumni of Tuskegee University in memory of Dr. Benjamin Payton, Fifth President of Tuskegee University, 1981–2010.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.