| Story for a Black Night | |
| Author: | Clayton Bess |
| Orig Lang Code: | en |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Set In: | Africa |
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Company |
| Publisher2: | Lookout Press |
| Pub Date: | 1982 |
| Media Type: | |
| Isbn: | 0618494839 |
| Website: | http://webpages.csus.edu/~boblocke/bess/story.html |
Story for a Black Night is a 1982 family drama novel by Robert Locke, under the pseudonym Clayton Bess,[1] set in Africa.[2] It won the 2002 Phoenix Award Honor Book award.[3] [4]
A 40-year-old man tells a story of his childhood, when he was ten, living with his sister, mother and grandmother.[5] When strangers left a baby with smallpox at the house, the family is affected by the disease.
The book was included in the University of Chicago's Center for Children's Books' volume "The Best in Children's Books:The University of Chicago Guide to Children's Literature, 1979-1984", which called it "a stunning first novel", "taut and tender, deftly structured, vivid".
There is also a link to the efforts of Rose-Marie Vassallo-Villaneau in her two translations into French. After the English version won the Phoenix Honor Award in 2002 for a book that has endured, she decided that she wanted to do a second translation, this time attempting her own French West African dialect.
Also from this main page is a link to the 2014 one-act play "PURE HEART in Black of Night" with the author now using his playwright's name Robert Locke.