Philadelphia Fire

John Edgar Wideman

1990 First Edition. Henry Holt, New York

Green letters on brown cloth spine over green boards in FINE condition in a like Brodart protected dust jacket.  199 pp.  Wideman was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and the first author to win the international PEN/Faulkner Award twice. He is also a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee and has won the O. Henry Award.

Based on the 1985 fire bombing by police of a West Philadelphia row house owned the Afrocentric cult Move.  The Police bombing of the Move house ignited a fire that caused the deaths of at least eleven people barricaded inside, many of them women, five of them children. Thereafter, it spread uncontrollably through the black, middle-class neighborhood, totally destroying more than sixty houses and leaving 250 people homeless.