Browse Items (27 total)

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Categorized as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “dialect poems,” The Poems of Cabin and Field were written in an imagined black vernacular. Paired with staged photographs of plantation life, the poetry collection was one of the first publications to project a…

Best known as the author of the 1952 American classic Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison didn’t see most of his work published during his lifetime. Juneteenth was published as his second novel, following his death in 1994. Originally spanning over 2,000…

Set on the south side of Chicago in the 1930s and written from post-renaissance Harlem, Richard Wright’s Native Son presents the reality of racism in the U.S. during the Jim Crow era. Following protagonist Bigger Thomas through an impoverished life…