Sonny's Blues
A Harlem algebra teacher reads on the subway that his younger brother has been picked up in a raid for heroin, and cannot make himself write until his own small daughter dies; outside the school a boy from Sonny's old crowd waits in the doorway to talk about it and to ask for a dollar. When Sonny is released and moves back in, the argument the brothers never finished starts up again - the piano, Charlie Parker, a dead mother's warning about their father's brother, and the difference between suffering kept private and suffering somebody else can hear. Published in Partisan Review in 1957 and later collected in Going to Meet the Man, the most taught American story about what music is for.
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Lineage
- alludes to ↑ The Parable of the Prodigal Son
Attributes
Closest analogues
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