In Connecting Times Norman Harris focuses on how Afro-Americans involved in the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement, or the Vietnam War either failed or achieved in making sense of their lives when the goals they struggled for were not accomplished. In seven novels whose plot and characterization are determined by one or more of these major historical events — Meridian, Look What They Done to My Song, The Cotillion or One Good Bull is Half the Herd, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Captain Blackman, Coming Home, and Tragic Magic — Harris finds the basis for his interpretations, and he finds the place of these novels likewise in the context of historical writings of the 1960s.

Central to Harris’s analysis of history through literature is the idea of the quest myth that permeates Afro-American culture. Accordi