A devoted cadre of friends and later admirers from the 1970s to the present pushed for the publication of his work. After his death he became a kind of literary legend, but one whose full story was unknown. Dumas was shot and killed in 1968 in Harlem months before his thirty-fourth birthday by a white transit policeman under circumstances never fully explained. While he certainly should be understood in the context of the cultural and political movements of the 1960s-Black Arts, Black Power, and Civil Rights-his writing, and ultimately his life, were filled with ambiguities and contradictions.

A son of Sweet Home, Arkansas, and Harlem, he devoted himself to the creation of a black literary cosmos, one in which black literature and culture were windows into the human condition.

He chairs the department of African American and African Studies and teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University-Newark.Henry Dumas (1934–1968) was a writer who did not live to see most of his fiction and poetry in print. His recent honors include an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, and a 2018 John D. He has also translated the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books, 2014) and numerous other authors from Portuguese, French, and Spanish. Since 1968, he has edited and helped publish most of Dumas's poetry and fiction.John Keene's recent books include the story collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2016) and several books of poetry. Redmond taught along-side Henry Dumas at Southern Illinois University, where he is currently an emeritus professor of English. Louis in 1976, the same year Doubleday published his Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History. Redmond was named poet laureate of East St. In 1968, at the age of thirty-three, he was shot and killed by a New York City Transit Authority police officer.Eugene B. After returning, Dumas became active in the civil rights movement, married Loretta Ponton, had two sons, attended Rutgers University, worked for IBM, and taught at Hiram College in Ohio and at Southern Illinois University's Experiment in Higher Education in East St. He joined the air force in 1953 and spent a year on the Arabian Peninsula. Henry Dumas was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, in 1934 and moved to Harlem at the age of ten.

Henry dumas short stories