The System of Dante's Hell Author:LeRoi Jones 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 is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age, the special agony of the American Negro.« less