Wesley Brown

Joining me on this episode of Writers at Work is Wesley Brown, whose latest novel is LOOKING FOR FRANK WILLS. It's part of McSweeney's “Of the Diaspora” series that also included Wesley's debut novel, TRAGIC MAGIC, originally published in 1978 and celebrated by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and others. Wesley Brown is the author of three novels, a novella, a short story collection, and five plays. He also edited several anthologies and wrote the narration for the segment of the PBS documentary W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices. He is a professor emeritus in English at Rutgers University and a former visiting professor at Bard.

For readers and American history buffs, the name Frank Wills may ring a bell. Wills was the security guard who, in 1972, discovered the Watergate burglars mid-break-in. Without Wills' diligence, there may have been no Watergate scandal. And without Watergate, the Nixon administration may not have been held accountable for its criminal behavior that resulted in Nixon's resignation as president. I found Wesley's LOOKING FOR FRANK WILLS an ingenious way to tell a story of a man's life through the eyes of Wills' barber at Wayne's Clip and Trim in North Augusta, South Carolina.