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A Visitation Of Spirits By Randall Kenan

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Randall Kenan born in Brooklyn, NY 1963 was raised by his grandparents in a rural community in North Carolina. In 1985, he graduated the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in English and creative writing. One of his instructors recommended him for a job for and editor at Random House where he was an eventual assistant to senior editor’s prestigious subsidiary, Alfred A. Knopf. (Fountain) Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published in 1989, and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, followed in 1992. He has written five other works and has received numerous awards. (RandallKenan.com) Randall Kenan is a talented African-American author of the present era who writes about the human condition. He not only writes about what it is like to be a black man in the south, but he throws in homosexuality into the bible belt. Kenan repeatedly pits homosexual characters against an oppressive, closed minded community that is against new views of acceptance and equality of the times. With these themes of racial and sexual identity, forgiveness and acceptance; “Kenan, perhaps one of the first Southern authors to openly analyze the struggles of homosexuals, he subtly intertwines common concerns and ideals from the Civil Rights Era and parallels the Gay Rights Movement of today.” (Turley)
In the literary work “The Foundations of the Earth” by Randall Kenan we find Maggie McGowan Williams, an old black woman(seventy-three), Gabriel, the

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