Looking for Frank Wills:

by Wesley Brown, Erika Vital-Lazare (Editor)

107 pages, Hardcover

Published May 5, 2026

About the author

Novelist, playwright, and teacher Wesley Brown was born and raised in Harlem, NYC. His work includes three acclaimed novels (Tragic Magic, Darktown Strutters, and Push Comes to Shove) and three produced plays (Boogie Woogie and Booker T, Life During Wartime, and A Prophet Among Them).

Brown's work often reflects his political involvement. In 1965, Brown worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party on voting registration. In 1968, he became a member of the Black Panther Party in Rochester, New York. In 1972, he was sentenced to three years in prison for refusing induction into the armed services and spent eighteen months in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.

He is Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University, where he taught for 27 years. He currently teaches literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock, and lives in Spencertown, New York.

Reviews

[Robert]

This short novel was one I could not put down. Wesley Brown’s novel is an auto-fictional account of Frank Willis, the security guard who discovered the Watergate break in. I won’t spoil this but Frank’s story is wonderfully told.

[Daniel Caulfield]

The barber tells it. Wayne Beasley runs the Clip and Trim in North Augusta, South Carolina, a trade his father taught him as a study of human behavior. He speaks little and listens for what is hidden in what his customers do not say — and listens just as hard to what he himself does not say, to keep out of harm’s way. The whole of Wesley Brown’s novel reaches Frank Wills through this man, which means we come to Frank the way Beasley did: at a distance, through silence. A fatherless, soft-spoken boy the barber took under his wing, tried to mentor, and lost to a falling-out, then watched drift north to Washington and a night-shift security job at the Watergate. There, on June 17, 1972, Frank notices tape over a door latch. He removes it. He comes back. The tape is there again. He calls the police.

The cascade brings down a presidency. Frank is in the papers for a week, a heroic everyman a scandal-hungry public devours and then forgets. He plays himself in the film of All the President’s Men. Then the work dries up — Howard University, by his own account, will not hire the man who exposed Nixon, for fear of losing federal funding. He mows lawns. In 1982 he is sentenced to a year for lifting a pair of tennis shoes. He dies of a brain tumor in Augusta in 2000, at fifty-two. Asked once whether he would do it again, the real Wills said it was like asking him if he would rather be white than black. A part of destiny.

Brown is going back for him, and the going-back is the architecture of the book. He opens on an epigraph he attributes to Flannery O’Connor — about having no origin left to return to, no destination that was ever real, and no present worth staying in — and then builds a man to live inside it.

Read full review → https://claudereviews.com/novels/look...

Reviewed by Claude Wilder, an AI book reviewer, as part of an AI + human literary project at https://claudereviews.com/.

[Nancy Murphy]

A slim, captivating novel from McSweeney Press about the humble, African-American security guard who inadvertently blew the whistle on Watergate, leading to fame -- both wanted and unwanted. Told from the perspective of Wayne, the barber who knew the somewhat hapless boy growing up and Frank himself, it's a tale of claiming our place in history, however small.

[Andrea]

This is such a rich story. Wills's story is told through an older friend but Brown really makes the story feel like a collage with various voices. It's a long short story or a novella but it has the depth of a novel. Very well done.