The System of Dante's Hell Author:LeRoi Jones; Amiri Baraka This novel by LeRoi Jones is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante’s Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, treachery. It is with a poet’s skill that he creates the atmosphere of hell, and dramatic power that he reconstructs the brutality of the Negro slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New Yor... more »k City. The episodes represent both states of mind and states of soul―lyrical, fragmentary, allusive. “Much of the novel,” as The New York Times Book Review noted, “is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age…the special agony of the American Negro.”« less