Leon Forrest

Writer, journalist, and educator

• Born: January 8, 1937
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: November 6, 1997
• Place of death: Evanston, Illinois

Well known for his spiritual, rhythmic, jazz-infused novels, Forrest also was an accomplished journalist and college professor. Although his novels focus on African American life on Chicago’s South Side, they have universal appeal.

Early Life

Leon Richard Forrest, Jr., was born in 1937 to Adeline Green Forrest and Leon Forrest, Sr., and raised in a segregated neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. His interest in music and writing was inspired by his mother, a jazz aficionado who wrote short stories, and his father, a lyricist and vocalist. Forrest attended St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church with his mother’s family and Pilgrim Baptist Church with his father. From these experiences he gained an appreciation for ritual as well as a great respect for oral tradition, which is reflected in his literary works.

Forrest attended Hyde Park High School, which at the time was one of the top twenty high schools in the nation. While his parents aspired for him to become a doctor, Forrest showed greater promise in creative writing and became president of the Creative Writing Club at his school. He graduated in 1955.

In 1956, his parents divorced; a year later, his mother married an accountant, William Harrison Pitts. Forrest worked as a clerk and relief bartender in the family’s 408 Lounge while attending Roosevelt University from 1957 to 1958. During this time, he became engrossed in the music of Charlie Parker and enrolled in a playwriting course with Norbert Hruby at the University of Chicago. In 1960, Forrest was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he served for two years as a public information specialist writing feature stories for the Third Armored Division newspaper, Spearhead.

Life’s Work

Following his tour of duty in the Army, Forrest studied poetry and writing through the University of Chicago Extension Division. Inspired by William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), he redirected his energy toward novel writing. In August, 1964, his mother died suddenly, and Forrest moved into a small room in an old building at Sixty-first and Dorchester among musicians, artists, retired professors, and writers; he began to write his first novel.

Over the next nine years, Forrest worked as a journalist for several local weekly newspapers, including The Woodlawn Booster and The Englewood Bulletin, which gave him ample time to pursue creative writing. In 1966, “That’s Your Little Red Wagon,” was published in a short-lived magazine, Blackbird. From 1969 to 1973, Forrest was an associate editor and wrote feature stories on the arts for the Nation of Islam’s weekly newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. His father, Leon Forrest, Sr., died of chronic diabetes in April, 1971. In September of that year, Forrest married Marianne Duncan and sent the manuscript of his first novel, which he called Wakefulness, to Toni Morrison, an editor for Random House. Morrison offered him a contract and suggested the title There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden. In 1972, he was promoted to managing editor of Muhammad Speaks and was the paper’s last non-Muslim editor.

There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, the first novel in the Forest County trilogy, was released by Random House in May, 1973, and was lauded by literary greats such as Ellison and Saul Bellow. Forrest followed with The Bloodworth Orphans (1977) and Two Wings to Veil My Face (1984), which won numerous awards, including the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for Fiction, the Friends of Literature Prize, and the Society of Midland Authors Award for Fiction.

Forrest was the first African American president of the prestigious Society of Midland Authors from 1981 to 1982. Three years later, Chicago mayor Harold Washington declared April 14, 1985, as Professor Leon Forrest Day in honor of “his unique writing style of using African American culture to fuel a language which matches the eloquence of blues, spirituals and sermons.”

In 1973, Forrest joined the faculty of Northwestern University as an associate professor of African American studies. He was granted tenure in 1978. After being promoted to full professor in 1984, he chaired the African American Studies Department from 1985 to 1994 and received a joint appointment to the English Department. He lectured on Fyodor Dostoevski, Faulkner, and Ellison at universities across the country and visited Berlin and Hamburg as part of a ten-day exchange program for Chicago writers and German writers in 1994.

Forrest’s fourth novel, Divine Days (1992), received the 1993 Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award for fiction. A section of the spring, 1993, issue of literary journal Callaloo was devoted to studies of Forrest’s works. In 1996, the Illinois Association of Teachers of English named him author of the year. A dramatic and musical interpretation of his first novel, There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden was performed at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater just days after Forrest died from prostate cancer on November 6, 1997. His final novel, Meteor in the Madhouse, was published posthumously in 2001.

Significance

Although Forrest’s novels did not garner broad commercial success, they were literary and artistic triumphs that blended a variety of genres with jazz-inspired poetic prose. His exploration of African American culture, identity, and spirituality used sermons as the wellspring of rebirth and renewal. In his novels, Forrest explored a world occupied by everyday people with common experiences, a world unconstrained by the boundaries of the South Side of Chicago.

Bibliography

Cawelti, John G., ed. Leon Forrest: Introductions and Interpretations. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997. This book combines biography with a critical analysis of Forrest’s first four novels and includes three interviews with Forrest.

Forrest, Leon. Divine Days. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. A microcosm of African American life told through the eyes of aspiring playwright Joubert Jones during a crucial week in 1966. Literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., called this twelve-hundred-page novel the War and Peace of African American literature.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Meteor in the Madhouse. Evanston, Ill.: TriQuarterly Books, 2001. A collection of five novellas set in the last days of journalist Joubert Jones’s life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Relocations of the Spirit. Wakefield, R.I.: Asphodel Press, 1994. Reprinted in paperback as The Furious Voice of Freedom: Essays on Life, this collection of essays explores Forrest’s personal and literary influences.

Williams, Dana A., ed. Conversations with Leon Forrest. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007. A collection of interviews with Forrest from 1975 to 1997.