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Albert Murray was born in Nokomis, Alabama, in 1916. He was educated at Tuskegee Institute, where he later taught literature and directed college theater. He is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Seven League Boots, The Blue Devils of Nada, and The Spyglass Tree. He lives in New York City.
Photo: Joan Bingham
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In Conjugations and Reiterations Albert Murray, one of the premier literary men of our time, gives us his first collection of poetry. Wide ranging and informed by his singular intelligence and sensibility, these poems are extraordinary for their keen folk wisdom and striking lyricism, partaking of the idioms of blues and jazz. The vicissitudes of American life, the improvisatory nature of American art, the profundities of the Gospel and of gospel music—these are but a few of the concerns in Murray’s poetic achievement.
Conjugations and Reiterations stands in ringing confirmation of The New Yorker’s celebration of Albert Murray as a writer “possessed of the poet’s language, the novelist’s sensibility, the essayist’s clarity, the jazzman’s imagination, and the gospel singer’s depth of feeling.”
“Albert Murray is as close to a classic man of letters as one might find in this country today.” —Boston Globe
“Murray’s perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor, and its tenacious hold on the intellect.” —Toni Morrison
“Albert Murray is one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary American literature. He is our premier writer about jazz and blues, an incisive literary critic, and a social commentator of wide-ranging vision.” —Washington Post Book World
“Murray is a genial, fluent, jazzy raconteur whose idiomatic voice is as finely tuned as a concert-ready Steinway piano.” —The New York Times
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