From Clotel to Passing: Black American Writing, 1853-1929

Nella Larsen, a novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote two brilliant novels that interrogated issues of gender and race. In Passing, her second novel published in 1929, she examines the troubled friendship between two mixed-race women who can pass as white.

Published in 1899 by Houghton Mifflin, Chesnutt's first book, The Conjure Woman, was a collection of seven short stories, all set in "Patesville" (Fayetteville), North Carolina. While drawing from local color traditions and relying on dialect, Chesnutt's tales of conjuring, a form of magic rooted in African hoodoo, refused to romanticize slave life or the "Old South."

The Souls of Black Folk is a well-known work of African-American literature by activist W.E.B. Du Bois. The book, published in 1903, contains several essays on race, some of which had been previously published in Atlantic Monthly magazine. Du Bois drew from his own experiences to develop this groundbreaking work on being African-American in American society.

Johnson's only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, was originally published anonymously in 1912. It is a fictional novel written as a memoir of an unnamed biracial narrator who grew up in the South during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras.

Clotel; or, The President's Daughter is a novel by William Wells Brown (1814-84), a fugitive from slavery and abolitionist and was published in London, England in December 1853. It is often considered the first African-American novel.

This is the story of Iola Leroy, a free-born, mixed-race woman who passed as white. Her true racial identity eventually discovered, she was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Later freed by the Union Army, she journeyed to find others of her family who had been disunited from each other and strewn across the south by the forces of slavery.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, despite an impressive record of productivity and creativity as a novelist, playwright, short fiction writer, editor, actress, and singer, is an African-American woman writer who has essentially been consigned to the dustbins of American literary history.

Imperium in Imperio is a historical fiction novel by Sutton Griggs, published in 1899. The novel covers the life of Belton Piedmont, an educated and disciplined black man in the Jim Crow south and his role in a shadow government of black men operated out of a college in Waco, Texas.

In The Marrow of Tradition, Charles W. Chesnutt--using the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina massacre as a backdrop--probes and exposes the raw nerves and internal machinery of racism in the post-Reconstruction-era South; explores how miscegenation, caste, gender and the idea of white supremacy informed Jim Crow laws; and unflinchingly revisits the most brutal of terror tactics, mob lynchings.

The Sport of the Gods is a novel by Paul Laurence Dunbar, first published in 1902, centered around urban black life. Forced to leave the South, a family falls apart amid the harsh realities of Northern inner city life in this 1902 examination of the forces that extinguish the dreams of African Americans. (Summary from Wikipedia)

These stories focus on the Creole society of New Orleans and in the process reveals issues facing black Americans at the end of the nineteenth-century. - Summary by Jim Locke

"This is the true story of a negro who was discontented and the circumstances that were the outcome of that discontent." While considered a novel, this largely autobiographical story is based on the author's experience as an African-American pioneer in South Dakota. (Summary by MaryAnn)

The Book of American Negro Poetry is one of the earliest and most essential anthologies of African-American verse ever brought to print. Edited by writer and diplomat James Weldon Johnson, this collection was published with the hope of bringing to the public a greater awareness of the art and literature created by Black writers.

An award winning Jamaican poet who writes passionately about his birth home and his adopted home, USA. Claude McKay vividly describes family life, love, hate, work, and social life. The reader obtains a strong sense of black life through his colorful and emotional poetry. . - Summary by Denise Ray

Reading this book, I had a vision of a land, heretofore sunk in the mists of muteness, suddenly rising up into the eminence of song. Innumerable books have been written about the South; some good books have been written in the South. This book is the South. . . . . Part One is the primitive and evanescent world of Georgia.

Countee Cullen’s poetry in Color contemplates Black Americans’ fractured sense of self—at once spiritually tied to homelands where their ancestors were kidnapped and rooted in the white supremacist society where they live.

Fine Clothes to the Jew is a 1927 poetry collection by Langston Hughes. The collection was widely criticized, especially in the Black press, because it departed from sentimental depictions of African-American culture. - Summary modified from Wikipedia

Quicksand is a 1928 novel by Nella Larsen, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman who is a schoolteacher in the American south. As the novel opens, she suddenly decides to give up her teaching position and go north, back to her roots in Chicago.

This story begins as Matthew Towns, a brilliant young Black medical student, is dismissed from medical school because the white board has decided white women are not appropriate patients for a Black doctor. In disgust with his own country, Matthew leaves America and goes to Europe.

An exploration into the life of young African American, Emma Lou, whose self-image is negatively impacted by the stigmas of colorism and intra-community racism. - Summary by James K. White