NAME GAME
Sassafras Winters was the name of a real major league centerfielder who played at
the turn of the 20th Century. Chinaman is named after the Valerie Perrine
character from the 1976 film W.C. Fields and Me, and modeled after Edward Everett
Horton. Norton Denbrough’s name is a composite of Ed Norton (Art Carney’s
Honeymooner character) and George Denbrough (Stephen King’s IT),
two characters who are more than a little familiar with sewers.COINCIDENCE?
Steve Jones first read about Orson Welles’s Voodoo Macbeth in Barbara
Leaming’s 1985 biography Orson Welles. Three days after Jones purchased the
book and began reading it, Welles died of a heart attack in Las Vegas.
YOU’VE GOT TO START
SOMEWHERE
King of Harlem originally appeared as a six-page comics story in Ed
Gorman’s MysteryScene Magazine in 1987. This was the first published story by
both Jones and his favorite collaborator, Christopher Jones, the artist for the
novel’s front cover. It was Gorman who encouraged Jones to turn his comics plot into
a novel.
IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T
SUCCEED
King of Harlem was originally written in 1987. When Jones’ literary
agent failed to sell the manuscript, Jones rewrote the novel again in 1992.
THE NICEST OF COMPLIMENTS
James MacPhail, an African author teaching at the University of Iowa in 1989, was
so impressed with the first chapter of King of Harlem that he encouraged Jones to
attend the UofI’s prestigious Writer’s Workshop M.F.A. Program. Jones was
accepted into the Writer’s Workshop in 1990, but could not attend, mostly due to the
high cost of tuition. |
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