Barry Beckham

Note: The writer's name is erroneously listed as "Barry Beckman" on History of Black Novel Writing.

Barry Beckham (1944-?) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey at age 9. He attended Brown University, where he was one of only eight black students in his freshman class. He would later go on to direct the graduate writing program at Brown, but during his time there as an undergraduate, he began writing his first novel, My Main Mother was published in 1969 when Beckham was only 25. Of My Main Mother, New York Times critic Pete Rowley said, "if Barry Beckham's second book is as brilliant as the second half of his first, he may well become one of the best American novelists of the decade."

Beckham's next novel,1972's Runner Mack, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1973.

He had difficulty finding a publisher for his 1980 novel Double Dunk, so he began a publishing house, Beckham House Publishing. In 1982, with help from Brown students, he wrote the Black Student's Guide to Colleges.

Notably, in 1997, he began serially publishing You have a Friend: The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Chase Manhattan Bank, based on his experiences working for the bank. It is considered the first book to be serially published on the Internet.

Beckham said in a 2015 interview, " “[t]he role of the writer in general is not to solve the problem. I don’t think that is our responsibility or objective. More importantly, we bring up the issues and leave it there for the reader.”

Sources:

“Beckham, Barry.” Encyclopedia of African-American Literature, by Wilfred D. Samuels et al., Facts on File, 2007.

Carvajal, Doreen. “Middling Writers Are Unloved by Publishers.” New York Times, 1997.

Rutter, Emily. "Barry Beckham's Runner Mack and the Tradition of Black Baseball Literature." MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 42 no. 1, 2017, pp. 74-93. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/658254.