"Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age . . . the special agony of the American Negro."—The New York Times Book Review

This 1965 novel is structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, treachery. With a poet's skill Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City.

Amiri Baraka (1934–2014) was the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey by the New Jersey Commission on Humanities, from 2002 to 2004. His short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone (Akashic Books) was a New York Times Editors' Choice and won a 2008 PEN Beyond Margins Award.