This image is the cover for the book System of Dante's Hell

System of Dante's Hell

“A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno.” —Kirkus Reviews

This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante’s Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, and treachery. With a poet’s skill, Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul—lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.

With an introduction by Woodie King Jr.

“Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age . . . the special agony of the American Negro.” —The New York Times Book Review

“It’s a tortured nightmare, excruciatingly honest and alive, painful and beautiful . . .” —Michael Rumaker, author of A Day and a Night at the Baths

Amiri Baraka, Woodie King

Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1934–2014) was the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named poet laureate of New Jersey by the New Jersey Commission for the Humanities, from 2002–2004. His short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone (Akashic Books) was a New York Times Editors' Choice and won a 2008 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. He is also the author of Home: Social Essays, Black Music, and Tales, among other works.

Akashic Books