The winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the subject of an Oscar-nominated film by Stephen Spielberg two years later, The Color Purple by Alice Walker is often associated with the struggle of black women to gain self-respect and independence…. Read More ›
Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter is widely recognized as the first novel published by an African American writer. The novel centers on Clotel, the mixed-race daughter of Thomas Jefferson, and explores the devastating effects of slavery, racial prejudice, and gender… Read More ›
Comprising three self-contained yet interrelated sections of prose, poetry, and a play, Cane presents scenes of African-American life and features characters that attempt to reconcile opposites of the African-American experience. The book’s narrative events seem disconnected, and time flows irregularly…. Read More ›
Set in Brooklyn during the 1930s and 1940s, Brown Girl, Brownstones is Paule Marshall’s first novel. Following the classic structure of a bildungsroman, it recounts the story of Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants, from age 11 to 20…. Read More ›
The early post–Civil War promise of equal protection and increased civil rights for African Americans was eviscerated by decades of Jim Crow laws, culminating in the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that sanctioned legalized racial segregation. This… Read More ›
Since 1970 American literature has been characterized by an extraordinary proliferation of imaginative writing, a good deal of it by African, Native, Asian, and Latino Americans who have found success in all literary genres—fiction, poetry, memoir and autobiography, and drama…. Read More ›
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