The System of Dante's Hell

A reissue of a 1965 novel, a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, spiraling out of Dante's Inferno.

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

“A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno. . . . Other writers addressed race more directly, but for all its linguistic slippe...