It’s the birthday of author John Edgar Wideman (b. 1941), one of the most extraordinary, celebrated, and important authors writing about black men in America.

Born in Washington, D.C., Wideman was raised in Homewood, a section of Pittsburgh purportedly founded by a former slave, and then Shadyside. He was valedictorian of his high school class and continued to rise as an academic star at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his B.A. in 1963 and a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. In 1966 he returned to Penn as a faculty member and began writing novels. He left Penn for the University of Wyoming in 1975.

In 1976, Wideman’s younger brother took part in a robbery that ended in the victim’s death (an accomplice shot the victim in the shoulder) and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and Wideman began visiting him in the penitentiary. In 1984 he published the nonfiction work Brothers and Keepers: A Memoir, exploring the great divergence between his and his brother’s lives. By now Wideman had also published three of his breakout books, the Homewood Trilogy: Damballah (1981), a short story collection, and the novels Hiding Place (1981) and Sent for You Yesterday (1983).

Wideman left Wyoming for the University of Massachusetts in 1985, and in 1986 his son Jacob, a teenager, stabbed a friend to death while traveling for a camping trip. Jacob was tried as an adult and also received life in prison, but with the possibility of parole, and was released after 30 years. Wideman has said relatively little about his son’s situation out of respect for his son’s wish for privacy.

Wideman was the first author to receive two PEN/Faulkner Awards for Fiction, the first for Sent for You Yesterday and the second for Philadelphia Fire (1990). In 2016 he published the nonfiction book Writing to Save a Life (2016) about the life of Louis Till, father of Emmet Till, who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955; Louis was executed by the military 10 years earlier after being tried for rape and murder and convicted on the basis of extremely dubious evidence.

Wideman lives with his second wife in Lower Manhattan, where most of the people he interacts with have no idea that he’s an award-winning novelist, recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He explains in a New York Times interview that this anonymity is “exactly what I like” (Thomas Chatterton Williams, “John Edgar Wideman Against the World,” New York Times, January 26, 2017). The interview is worth reading.

Have a brilliant Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.