Browse Items (27 total)

Recognized as the first black woman to break into the genre, Octavia Butler forever altered the white, male-centric world of science fiction. Kindred follows Dana Franklin as she is thrown back and forth between 1976 and the nineteenth century…

Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, recounts his life as a young political activist, prisoner, and central figure in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. In his autobiography, Mandela details his twenty-seven year…

Maya Angelou, a famed author, playwright, activist, and poet is best known for her seven autobiographies. Scholars and critics have favored the autobiographies leaving her poetry largely unexamined. Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well was the…

On February 13, 1943, the fictional character Jesse B. Semple debuted as the protagonist of a new weekly column written by Langston Hughes. Known as Simple, Hughes crafted him to be emblematic of working class African Americans in the mid-20th…

Published posthumously, Langston Hughes’s final book of poems Black Misery is categorized as children’s literature. Hughes was approached by publisher Paul Eriksson in 1967 to write Black Misery, a literal blackening of children’s author Suzanne…

Originally published anonymously in 1912, this 1927 edition of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man was the first to credit James Weldon Johnson as the author. Written during the nascent period of the Harlem Renaissance, the fictional…

James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” first appeared in 1957 in Partisan Review, a prominent literary magazine. “Sonny’s Blues” was reprinted in Going to Meet the Man among seven additional short stories by Baldwin. Utilizing a jazz motif,…

Helon Habila’s debut novel Waiting for an Angel is a literary endeavor to capture a sliver of Nigeria’s postcolonial history. Following a journalist and poet living in the country following the colonial period, Habila utilizes historical moments to…

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antebellum novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was originally published as a serial piece in The National Era newspaper in 1851 and 1852. Eventually published as a novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has a controversial historical legacy. Heralded…

The only novella published by famed Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha is a loosely autobiographical narrative of a black woman growing up in Bronzeville, the hub of the Chicago Renaissance. On the streets of Bronzeville, Brooks interacted…