"Love's Resilience: Reflections on the Afterword to 'Lover Man'"

When the first American edition of Lover Man appeared in 1959, great pains were taken to make it intelligible to a white readership. A line on the dust jacket--"Stories of Blacks and Whites"--assured white readers that this collection of stories about Black Americans was also, improbably, about them. And in a foreword, the English poet, novelist, and critic Robert Graves advised fellow white people on how the stories should be read and decoded.

Lover Man, he explained, was a work of "judicious signifying"--in other words, "making a remark about something unremarkable in a situation and pretending to ignore the main issue." Once you, the white reader, could fathom this diversionary habit, Graves predicted, the observational wit of Andersons prose would be evident, for Lover Man is the "real thing."