Summary It is Sunday morning. Alfred accompanies his three little cousins and Aunt Pearl as they walk to church. The five pass a rally featuring a street speaker who advocates racial separation and resistance to white control. As Major did in the clubroom in the first chapter, the speaker taunts […]
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Summary Donatelli is a stocky man with crew-cut white hair. He carries himself in a military manner and is very businesslike, even brusque, as he first measures Alfred (five feet seven and three-quarter inches tall) and then weighs (124 1/2 pounds). Donatelli tells Alfred exactly what to expect if he […]
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Summary James is in jail. Alfred awakes in Aunt Pearl’s apartment and learns from Aunt Pearl that Henry Johnson found Alfred wandering around the previous night, beaten but not permanently injured, and that Henry and Henry’s father carried him home. When Aunt Pearl asks how he was hurt, Alfred tells […]
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Summary The setting is Harlem, a black neighborhood in the northeast corner of Manhattan in New York City. The time is the mid-1960s. It is twilight on a Friday. As the novel opens, Alfred Brooks, an African American seventeen-year-old high-school dropout, waits on his apartment building’s front stoop for his […]
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Alfred Brooks The protagonist of the novel, Alfred hopes to transcend the repressive atmosphere of Harlem and find a worthwhile life for himself. James Mosely Alfred’s best friend, James descends into drug addiction as Alfred climbs toward maturity. Aunt Pearl Conway James’ mother’s sister. Pearl provides a home and spiritual […]
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Introduction In his excellent critical biography, Presenting Robert Lipsyte, Michael Cart repeats Lipsyte’s account of how the sports journalist first got his idea for The Contender. Lipsyte was in Las Vegas to cover a heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and Floyd Patterson, scheduled for November 22, 1965. The night […]
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The Contender is a coming-of-age novel whose protagonist, a black seventeen-year-old high school dropout named Alfred Brooks, lives with his Aunt Pearl and her three daughters in Harlem, a predominantly African American neighborhood in Manhattan, New York City, in the mid-1960s. Alfred’s father deserted the family when Alfred was ten […]
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