Song of the Shank
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| Author | Jeffery Renard Allen |
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| Language | English |
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Publication date
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June 17, 2014 |
| Media type | Paperback |
| ISBN | |
Song of the Shank is a novel by Jeffery Renard Allen, published by Graywolf Press in 2014. It is the author’s second novel. His first novel, Rails Under My Back, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux fourteen years earlier in 2000.
The publisher described the novel as following: At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom.
In 1866, Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to readjust to their fashionable apartment in the City in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere—inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots—who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother. As the novel ranges from Tom’s boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets.
In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him. At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom. In 1866, Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to readjust to their fashionable apartment in the City in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere—inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots—who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother.
As the novel ranges from Tom’s boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets. In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him.'
In an essay Allen wrote about the novel and in interviews, he discusses how he began writing The Song of the Shank when he learned of Thomas Wiggins in Oliver Sacks' book An Anthropologist on Mars. Allen started researching Wiggins and working on the novel while he was a fellow at The Dorothy L. and Lewis B. Culllman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The fellowship began on September 10, 2001, one day before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
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