Ronald L. Fair’s Hog Butcher

by Robert Loerzel

Ronald L. Fair (1932–2018), an African American writer born and raised in Chicago, is best known for his excellent 1966 novel Hog Butcher, which tells the story of a Black youth killed by Chicago police when he’s mistaken for a burglary suspect. Booklist called it “A moving indictment of the hypocrisy and tragedy of segregation in a land professing a religious and democratic way of life … an effectively compact, vivid, troubling book.”

When Northwestern University Press published a new edition of Hog Butcher in 2014, novelist and lecturer Cecil Brown wrote an introduction, commenting: “Mr. Fair presented a new style of writing in Hog Butcher. The story is told not in a traditional narrative mode, but in an impressionistic style that relies heavily on interior monologue. … Along with Richard Wright’s first novel, Land Today! (published posthumously in 1963), Hog Butcher can be seen as a milestone in the use of interior monologue to portray the consciousness of African American characters. … Offering readers access to the minds of African American characters was an act of liberation.”

Kathleen Rooney praised Hog Butcher in a 2022 blog post for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, writing: “It’s a concise, complex, and multi-faceted depiction of structural inequality and white supremacy and the costs they extract from both their victims and their perpetrators. I would like to nominate Fair’s novel to appear alongside To Kill a Mockingbird on syllabi everywhere because instead of exceptionalism and white saviors, Fair’s story depicts—with a cast of lovable, hateable, believable characters from the young man who gets murdered to the cops who murder him—how power’s highest aim is always to preserve itself and how collective action is the best hope anyone can have against systemic injustice. …

“More than any other book that would be captivating to audiences of virtually any age or ability level, Hog Butcher plumbs the depths of America’s racial wounds. With literary grace and zero sentimentality, Fair illustrates how little many of us have done to deal with these wounds honestly on a national level and with an eye toward restoration or healing.”

Fair wrote three additional books: the 1965 novel Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable; 1970’s World of Nothing: Two Novellas; and 1972 the autobiographical novel We Can’t Breathe.  In the early 1970s, critic Shane Stevens called Fair “one of the two best black writers in the country.”

Brown, who talked with Fair in his later years, wrote: “It became clear to me then that Ron believed African American literature played a crucial function in the survival of African American culture.” But Fair was growing discouraged that so few people had read his books.

Hog Butcher was adapted into the 1975 movie Cornbread, Earl and Me, starring Laurence Fishburne, who was just 14 years old at the time. “Part of what made [Fair] lose his faith was the movie project that came out of Hog Butcher,” Brown wrote. “When the producer read his screenplay, he disliked it so much that he had a heart attack. Ron regaled me with that on the Skype call. Then, he wrote another draft, and the dude had a second heart attack! Then, the producer sold the project to somebody else. … After the disaster with the screenplay, Ron told me on Skype, he decided to give up on America. He turned his talent to sculpture.”

Fair moved to Finland in 1977. He died there in 2018—a fact that went unnoticed and unreported. It doesn’t appear that any American newspapers published an obituary of Fair. The news of his death finally surfaced in a 2020 blog post by Brown. When Brown had tried to email Fair, he’d received a message from Fair’s sister, informing him of the novelist’s death two years earlier.

“I cried,” Brown wrote. “I should have worked harder. I should have called Henry Louis Gates Jr. again and again. I should have demanded that the English department teach a class on his work! I should have tried harder. But then, Ron, you were right! Black people do not read. But White people do not read either.”

Library of America published a new paperback of Many Thousand Gone in 2023. Chicago Tribune writer Christopher Borrelli called it a “forgotten classic,” observing: “he reads now like a precursor to the fables of Percival Everett.”

Robert Loerzel is a freelance journalist and photographer who lives in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. A former reporter and editor for the suburban Pioneer Press newspapers, he now copyedits for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago magazine. He has reported for many media outlets, including Crain’s Chicago Business, Playbill, and the Chicago Reader, as well as WBEZ’s Curious City radio show and podcast. He cowrote two episodes of the documentary series Chicago Stories for WTTW: The Union Stockyards (which won a regional Emmy) and The Race to Reverse the River. He’s the author of Alchemy of Bones: Chicago’s Luetgert Murder Case of 1897 and Walking Chicago: 35 Tours of the Windy City’s Dynamic Neighborhoods and Famous Lakeshore. On his website, robertloerzel.com, he published a 48-chapter history, The Coolest Spot in Chicago: A History of Green Mill Gardens and the Beginnings of Uptown. His latest book, The Uptown: Chicago’s Endangered Movie Palace, co-authored with James A. Pierce, will be published August 1 by CityFiles Press.