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The System of Dante's Hell
"Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age...the special agony of the American Negro."
-- New York Times Book Review
"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 ....Other writers addressed race more directly, but for all its linguistic slipperiness, Baraka's language conveys the feelings of fear, violation, and fury with a surprising potency. A pungent and lyrical portrait of mid-'60s black protest."
-- Kirkus Reviews
With a new introduction by Woodie King Jr.
This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno : violence, incontinence, fraud, 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.
-- New York Times Book Review
"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 ....Other writers addressed race more directly, but for all its linguistic slipperiness, Baraka's language conveys the feelings of fear, violation, and fury with a surprising potency. A pungent and lyrical portrait of mid-'60s black protest."
-- Kirkus Reviews
With a new introduction by Woodie King Jr.
This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno : violence, incontinence, fraud, 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.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
35 people are currently reading
933 people want to read
About the author
Amiri Baraka
154 books395 followersPoems and plays, such as
Dutchman
(1964), of American writer Amiri Baraka originally Everett LeRoi Jones focus on racial conflict.
He attended Barringer high school. Coyt Leverette Jones, his father, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. Anna Lois Russ Jones, his mother, worked as a social worker.
He studied at Rutgers, Columbia, and Howard universities but left without a degree and attended the new school for social research. He won a scholarship to Rutgers in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard. He studied philosophy and religion, major fields. Jones also served three years in the air force as a gunner. Jones continued his studies of comparative literature at Columbia University. An anonymous letter accused him as a Communist to his commanding officer and led to the discovery of Soviet literature; afterward, people put Jones on gardening duty and gave him a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty.
In the same year, he moved to Greenwich Village and worked initially in a warehouse for music records. His interest in jazz began in this period. At the same time, he came into contact with Beat Generation, black mountain college, and New York School. In 1958, he married Hettie Cohen and founded Totem Press, which published such Beat Generation icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Jones in July 1960 visited with a delegation of Cuba committee and reported his impressions in his essay Cuba libre . He began a politically active art. In 1961, he published Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note , a first book. In 1963, Blues People: Negro Music in White America of the most influential volumes of criticism, especially in regard to the then beginning free jazz movement, followed. His acclaimed controversy premiered and received an Obie Award in the same year.
After the assassination of Malcolm X (1965), Jones left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem. His controversial revolutionary and then antisemitic.
In 1966, Jones married Sylvia Robinson, his second wife, who later adopted the name Amina Baraka. In 1967, he lectured at San Francisco State University. In 1967, he adopted the African name Imamu Amear Baraka, which he later changed to Amiri Baraka.
In 1968, he was arrested in Newark for allegedly carrying an illegal weapon and resisting arrest during the riots of the previous year, and people subsequently sentenced him to three years in prison; shortly afterward, Raymond A. Brown, his defense attorney, convinced an appeals court to reverse the sentence. In that same year, Black Music, his second book of jazz criticism, collected previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baraka penned some similar strongly anti-Jewish articles to the stance at that time of the Nation of Islam to court controversy.
Around 1974, Baraka himself from Black nationalism as a Marxist and a supporter of third-world liberation movements. In 1979, he lectured at Africana studies department of State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1980, he denounced his former anti-Semitic utterances, declaring himself an anti-Zionist.
In 1984, Baraka served as a full professor at Rutgers University, but was subsequently denied tenure. In 1989, he won a book award for his works as well as a Langston Hughes award.
In 1990, he co-authored the autobiography of Quincy Jones, and 1998 , he served as supporting actor in Bulworth, film of Warren Beatty. In 1996, the red hot organization produced Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip, and Baraka contributed to this acquired immune def
He attended Barringer high school. Coyt Leverette Jones, his father, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. Anna Lois Russ Jones, his mother, worked as a social worker.
He studied at Rutgers, Columbia, and Howard universities but left without a degree and attended the new school for social research. He won a scholarship to Rutgers in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard. He studied philosophy and religion, major fields. Jones also served three years in the air force as a gunner. Jones continued his studies of comparative literature at Columbia University. An anonymous letter accused him as a Communist to his commanding officer and led to the discovery of Soviet literature; afterward, people put Jones on gardening duty and gave him a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty.
In the same year, he moved to Greenwich Village and worked initially in a warehouse for music records. His interest in jazz began in this period. At the same time, he came into contact with Beat Generation, black mountain college, and New York School. In 1958, he married Hettie Cohen and founded Totem Press, which published such Beat Generation icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Jones in July 1960 visited with a delegation of Cuba committee and reported his impressions in his essay Cuba libre . He began a politically active art. In 1961, he published Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note , a first book. In 1963, Blues People: Negro Music in White America of the most influential volumes of criticism, especially in regard to the then beginning free jazz movement, followed. His acclaimed controversy premiered and received an Obie Award in the same year.
After the assassination of Malcolm X (1965), Jones left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem. His controversial revolutionary and then antisemitic.
In 1966, Jones married Sylvia Robinson, his second wife, who later adopted the name Amina Baraka. In 1967, he lectured at San Francisco State University. In 1967, he adopted the African name Imamu Amear Baraka, which he later changed to Amiri Baraka.
In 1968, he was arrested in Newark for allegedly carrying an illegal weapon and resisting arrest during the riots of the previous year, and people subsequently sentenced him to three years in prison; shortly afterward, Raymond A. Brown, his defense attorney, convinced an appeals court to reverse the sentence. In that same year, Black Music, his second book of jazz criticism, collected previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baraka penned some similar strongly anti-Jewish articles to the stance at that time of the Nation of Islam to court controversy.
Around 1974, Baraka himself from Black nationalism as a Marxist and a supporter of third-world liberation movements. In 1979, he lectured at Africana studies department of State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1980, he denounced his former anti-Semitic utterances, declaring himself an anti-Zionist.
In 1984, Baraka served as a full professor at Rutgers University, but was subsequently denied tenure. In 1989, he won a book award for his works as well as a Langston Hughes award.
In 1990, he co-authored the autobiography of Quincy Jones, and 1998 , he served as supporting actor in Bulworth, film of Warren Beatty. In 1996, the red hot organization produced Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip, and Baraka contributed to this acquired immune def
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
October 2, 2014
Perhaps, one of the best books I had ever re-read. My initial exposure was as a gregarious teenager looking for answers to questions no one wanted to address. Amiri did. Relevant. Enlightening. Explosive!
April 2, 2016
Amiri Baraka's The System of Dante's Hell is a brilliant little book I am grateful to have discovered. I had previously read Baraka's criticism (e.g. Blues People, published under the name LeRoi Jones) and was generally familiar with his reputation as a poet. To my knowledge, this is Baraka's only novel (originally published ca. 1965) and one of only two of this prolific writer's published works in the fiction category.
The newly published small paperback volume of just 160 pages belies the depth of the novel's thematic content as well as the complexity of its form. Baraka riffs on the structure of hell originally set forth by Dante to outline his perspective on humanity's faults, which is set forth in an unorthodox, stream-of-consciousness style. In addition to a pretty fascinating formal presentation, Baraka's work features ideas that command the reader's attention due to their particular boldness and poignancy.
I highly recommend this work to prior readers of Baraka, those interested in exploring his work's particular political and social themes (at this time in his career or generally), as well as to any lover of bold ideas in brilliant literary form. Baraka's prose always punches through to strike the audience with his meaning, as it were, and yet it also rewards close scrutiny of its textual nuances by readers so inclined.
Thank you for reading my thoughts. I hope they can be useful as you evaluate this prospective read.
Note: It was my great good fortune to win a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.
The newly published small paperback volume of just 160 pages belies the depth of the novel's thematic content as well as the complexity of its form. Baraka riffs on the structure of hell originally set forth by Dante to outline his perspective on humanity's faults, which is set forth in an unorthodox, stream-of-consciousness style. In addition to a pretty fascinating formal presentation, Baraka's work features ideas that command the reader's attention due to their particular boldness and poignancy.
I highly recommend this work to prior readers of Baraka, those interested in exploring his work's particular political and social themes (at this time in his career or generally), as well as to any lover of bold ideas in brilliant literary form. Baraka's prose always punches through to strike the audience with his meaning, as it were, and yet it also rewards close scrutiny of its textual nuances by readers so inclined.
Thank you for reading my thoughts. I hope they can be useful as you evaluate this prospective read.
Note: It was my great good fortune to win a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.
Read
March 22, 2016I can't decipher this. The writing is definitely expressive, but I can't get a solid impression. If I heard it as spoken beat poetry, maybe I can put together a picture. I'm not leaving a rating; I don't feel like I have the standing to. Baraka's done SOMETHING, and many people have recognized the value. I can tell it's inside, but can't unbox it. Maybe I'll try again one day.
July 10, 2017
Written in an unconventional, poetic prose that-if to be converted to music- would sound like an experimental, chaotic jazz piece composed by the legendary Sun Ra, a seminal piece of art in Amiri Baraka's -then Leroi Jones- body of work. The book chronicles the life of an unnamed protagonist- whom may or may not have been inspired by Baraka himself or a person whom he intimately knows- as under Jim Crow oppression in both the rural south and the urban north. With it's visual and descriptive writing, one can smell cluttered, littered Northern ghettoes as well as the fresh scent of Southern "poplar trees" that of course bore "Strange Fruit". In penning this work, Baraka was inspired by concepts of Dantes Inferno,alluding to dimensions of hell , applying those to the black experience where one is both an "invisible and hypervisible object" , marginalized by the overall society on the basis of human rights yet tokenized while in white dominated spaces. Amiri painted a vivid picture of Black- then Negro- Life in America , that while readers who aren't of African descendants may not readily resonate with, those of us who are will, as it will reflect our current conditions or read like an older relative reflecting on old times. I enjoyed this very much, a wild but all too familiar ride into the dark life of the black man.
Read
March 23, 2023Took me an absolute age, several restarts, but honestly up there in the pantheon of the best things I’ve read. Incredible stuff.
January 2, 2019
ultimately Baraka demonstrates how he’s pretty much guilty of every sin imaginable.
February 17, 2022
A devilish, harsh Albert Ayler-tearing-through-his-saxophone-free-jazz-freakout riff of a book.
May 9, 2024
GOOD LORD.
February 16, 2025
2 stars because it was too abstract of a ride for me although I did extract a couple of gems from his worlds.
5 stars for Amiri Baraka’s craft, deep soul, and intellect.
~
From “SOUND AND IMAGE”:
What is hell? Your definitions.
I am and was and will be a social animal.
Hell is definable only in those terms. I can get no place else; it wdn't exist.
Hell in this book which moves from sound and image ("association complexes") into fast narrative is what vision I had of it around 1960-61 and that fix on my life, and my interpretation of my earlier life.
Hell in the head.
The torture of being the unseen object, and, the constantly observed subject.
The flame of social dichotomy. Split open down the center, which is the early legacy of the black man unfocused on blackness. The dichotomy of what is seen and taught and desired opposed to what is felt. Finally, God, is simply a white man, a white "idea," in this society, unless we have made some other image which is stronger, and can deliver us from the salvation of our enemies.
For instance, if we can bring back on ourselves, the absolute pain our people must have felt when they came onto this shore, we are more ourselves again, and can begin to put history back in our menu, and forget the propaganda of devils that they are not devils.
* * * *
Hell is actual, and people with hell in their heads. But the pastoral moments in a man's life will also mean a great deal as far as his emotional references. One thinks of home, or the other "homes" we have had. And we remember w/love those things bathed in soft black light. The struggles away or toward this peace is Hell's
function. (Wars of consciousness. Antithetical definitions of feeling(s).
Once, as a child, I would weep for compassion and understanding. And Hell was the inferno of my frustration. But the world is clearer to me now, and many of its features, more easily definable.
1965
5 stars for Amiri Baraka’s craft, deep soul, and intellect.
~
From “SOUND AND IMAGE”:
What is hell? Your definitions.
I am and was and will be a social animal.
Hell is definable only in those terms. I can get no place else; it wdn't exist.
Hell in this book which moves from sound and image ("association complexes") into fast narrative is what vision I had of it around 1960-61 and that fix on my life, and my interpretation of my earlier life.
Hell in the head.
The torture of being the unseen object, and, the constantly observed subject.
The flame of social dichotomy. Split open down the center, which is the early legacy of the black man unfocused on blackness. The dichotomy of what is seen and taught and desired opposed to what is felt. Finally, God, is simply a white man, a white "idea," in this society, unless we have made some other image which is stronger, and can deliver us from the salvation of our enemies.
For instance, if we can bring back on ourselves, the absolute pain our people must have felt when they came onto this shore, we are more ourselves again, and can begin to put history back in our menu, and forget the propaganda of devils that they are not devils.
* * * *
Hell is actual, and people with hell in their heads. But the pastoral moments in a man's life will also mean a great deal as far as his emotional references. One thinks of home, or the other "homes" we have had. And we remember w/love those things bathed in soft black light. The struggles away or toward this peace is Hell's
function. (Wars of consciousness. Antithetical definitions of feeling(s).
Once, as a child, I would weep for compassion and understanding. And Hell was the inferno of my frustration. But the world is clearer to me now, and many of its features, more easily definable.
1965
August 8, 2023
A MUST READ!!...The ONLY novel AMIRI BARAKA aka LEROI JONES EVER WROTE. READS like JAZZ RIFFS n POETRY/EXPERIMENTAL FLOW...one of the ORIGINATORS (and few Blacks along w/TED JOANS) of The BEAT POETS (KEROUAC, GINSBERG, BURROUGHS). This was dropped bout 1965 before BARAKA switched over frum LEROI JONES. This is a re-issue. Butt this joints snaps/crackles n pops-baby!! Kinda like a HOOD PICARESQUE NOVEL. Yessir. Git U sum riffing off DANTE’S INFERNO—which is mostly in the form of the name/being the only levels of hell is what a black man goes thru living in the Inner-City/traveling a buncha cities as he mooves round. Speculative in nature/Experimental language/Black Surrealism tone. Da whole nine. Peep game.
June 8, 2025
Skipped the Jpeg show wit Nia, started this instead, — Baraka’s work is certainly just as inclined if not more so of a feverish blackness in america, as good as Peggy’s 2016’s Black Ben Carson (you in a drake era? In this Kendrick economy?)
In the recent spirit of returning to books that you couldn’t finish, in the spirit of the next read will find more/others than the last. MY limited experiences compare this to Kathy Acker at times— in its emotional tenor but also how I would wake up every sentence on a new street in bed with a new person. I’m eating a rotten pear right now.
Impossibly rating something- can books, anything, be for some people and not others?
In the recent spirit of returning to books that you couldn’t finish, in the spirit of the next read will find more/others than the last. MY limited experiences compare this to Kathy Acker at times— in its emotional tenor but also how I would wake up every sentence on a new street in bed with a new person. I’m eating a rotten pear right now.
Impossibly rating something- can books, anything, be for some people and not others?
March 28, 2024
He pointed, like Odysseus
wd. Like Virgil, the weary shade, at some circle. For Dante, me, the yng wild virgin of the universe to look. To see what terror. What illusion. What sudden shame, the world is made. Of what death and lust I fondled and thot to make beautiful or escape, at least, into some other light, where each death was abstract & intimate.
wd. Like Virgil, the weary shade, at some circle. For Dante, me, the yng wild virgin of the universe to look. To see what terror. What illusion. What sudden shame, the world is made. Of what death and lust I fondled and thot to make beautiful or escape, at least, into some other light, where each death was abstract & intimate.
May 29, 2017
An experimental work of free writing; lyrical, fragmentary riffs on race, class, sexuality, and Dante's structure of hell
March 7, 2020
I generally like Baraka's work. This book was a bit tough to get through. Surreal. Different, for sure. But too disjointed to be his best.
January 24, 2024
Reading this is like,,, diving into the Devil's Waterhole (Inks Lake), swimming for days & nights, emerging to the Texan sun evaporating morning dew from once-sunken cities... :0
Read
February 9, 2025DNF
December 12, 2025
This book was so fire that I was moved to redownload this app and come back on here to announce that this book is so fire
July 10, 2023
Read this at your peril. Written from the perspective of a tortured black intellectual in the army, The System of Dante's Hell uses the Inferno as its substructure to trace the journey of its anti-hero. Fragmentary, allusive, imagistic, it is in 1965 the best poetry Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) wrote during that period. Also recommended is Tales written during the same period. Though that collection is not nearly as disjunctive, it shares the same narrative perspective, blasting off into the NewArk of Black Power. I'm less enthusiastic about the repudiations of Baraka's poetry--from Beat to Black Power to Marxist-Leninist-Maoism--but The System of Dante's Hell is, as Baraka described, "hell in the head."
March 29, 2016
I'd read Dante's "The Inferno" (in English) a couple of times and was very much looking forward to reading this book. Baraka wrote it in 1963 when he was still LeRoi Jones; Woodie King Jr., producer and director of the writer's plays points out in his introduction this was a time when "America had not yet witnessed the Watts Riots, Malcolm had not been assassinated, the the Black Arts Movement was not in ascendance..."
Though I'd heard of Baraka's last play, "The Most Dangerous Man in America," about WEB DuBois, I haven't seen it, nor did I know the writer's name — unfortunately a big gap in my education.
Knowing that this experimental work had for its writer an intense connection with Dante's gave me a place to start. The language and imagery of "The System of Dante's Hell" are powerful and vivid, and forcefully push forward even an uninformed reader. It is both poetry and novel, free-form, yet it corresponds with the structure of Hell in Dante's work.
There is freedom, however, and there is freedom. Baraka’s form of writing can be called free in that it is not in accordance with any classically European poetic form like that with which Dante wrote. Even without such a rigorous set of rules to constrain his expression, however, his words and meaning are imbued with imprisonment, the imprisonment of his life.
Dante used a constraining form of writing to express imprisonment in the tortures of Hell for eternity as the consequences of choices made in life. Baraka, whose time, place and conventions of writing are different, makes what choices he can. Terrifyingly, for a black person in America, those choices are made in a life that is already Hell.
I have to confess that there is a lot that I don’t understand in this book. If I have misread it, please forgive me; know that I am moved and impressed by what I have read, and no disrespect is intended.
Though I'd heard of Baraka's last play, "The Most Dangerous Man in America," about WEB DuBois, I haven't seen it, nor did I know the writer's name — unfortunately a big gap in my education.
Knowing that this experimental work had for its writer an intense connection with Dante's gave me a place to start. The language and imagery of "The System of Dante's Hell" are powerful and vivid, and forcefully push forward even an uninformed reader. It is both poetry and novel, free-form, yet it corresponds with the structure of Hell in Dante's work.
There is freedom, however, and there is freedom. Baraka’s form of writing can be called free in that it is not in accordance with any classically European poetic form like that with which Dante wrote. Even without such a rigorous set of rules to constrain his expression, however, his words and meaning are imbued with imprisonment, the imprisonment of his life.
Dante used a constraining form of writing to express imprisonment in the tortures of Hell for eternity as the consequences of choices made in life. Baraka, whose time, place and conventions of writing are different, makes what choices he can. Terrifyingly, for a black person in America, those choices are made in a life that is already Hell.
I have to confess that there is a lot that I don’t understand in this book. If I have misread it, please forgive me; know that I am moved and impressed by what I have read, and no disrespect is intended.
October 24, 2020
Earlier this year I read Dictee, another book doing some interesting things with structure and prose that really asked me to give up the level of control I like to have over the content I am reading (like everything is a text I could teach) and just roll with it. That drove me back to my shelves to see what other books had presented me with similar challenges. Dante’s version of hell created a ominous bare structure for Baraka’s story to fill out and the combination of old and (relatively) new was so powerful.
April 13, 2016
"An empty fight against the sogginess that had already crept in thru his eyes. A bare bulb on a cluttered room. A dirty floor full of food particles and roaches. Lower middle-class poverty. In ten years merely to lose one's footing on a social scale. Everything else, that seriousness, past, passed. Almost forgotten." - Amiri Baraka
July 3, 2012
best book ever written
August 28, 2020
Extremely well written highly recommended
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews