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African Americans in Literature
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Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Separated by respective ambitions after falling in love in occupied Nigeria, beautiful Ifemelu experiences triumph and defeat in America while exploring new concepts of race, while Obinze endures an undocumented status in London until the pair is reunited in their homeland 15 years later, where they face the toughest decisions of their lives. By the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun.
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The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou
by Maya Angelou
A single volume omnibus edition featuring Angelou's celebrated autobiographies contains I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, and A Song Flung Up to Heaven.
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The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou
by Maya Angelou
Presents a definitive collection of poetry from Angelou's previous anthologies--Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water, Oh Pray my Wings Gonna Fit Me Well, And Still I Rise, I Shall Not Be Moved, On the Pulse of Morning, and Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
First published in 1953, this is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
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Collected Essays
by James Baldwin
A comprehensive compilation of Baldwin's previously published, nonfiction writings encompasses essays on America's racial divide, the social and political turbulence of his time, and his insights into the poetry of Langston Hughes and the music of Earl Hines.
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Queen Sugar: A Novel
by Natalie Baszile
Hoping for a new start when she unexpectedly inherits a sugarcane farm, Charley moves to Louisiana, where she confronts her grandmother's judgmental beliefs while balancing the farm's overwhelming challenges with the needs of her homesick daughter, her troubled brother and her own yearning heart.
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Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It?
by
Ranging from 1861 to the present day, an anthology of works by many of Chicago's leading black writers includes poetry, fiction, drama, essays, journalism, and historical and social commentary, by W. E. B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, Charles Johnson, and many others.
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Ruby: A Novel
by Cynthia Bond
Loving the beautiful but damaged Ruby all of his life, Ephraim is torn between his dutiful sister and a chance for a life with Ruby when the latter returns to their small East Texas home and confronts the dark forces that traumatized her early years. A first novel.
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The Essential Gwendolyn Books
by Gwendolyn Brooks
A selection of the influential African-American poet's works reflects her modernist style and includes numerous definitive World War II poems as well as pieces about the social and political upheavals of the 1960s.
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Selected Poems
by Gwendolyn Brooks
The classic volume by the distinguished modern poet, winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, showcases an esteemed artist's technical mastery, her warm humanity, and her compassionate and illuminating response to a complex world.
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Clotel & Other Writings
by William Wells Brown
A bicentennial collection in tribute to the pioneering African-American novelist offers insight into his firsthand experiences with slavery and war and includes such literary works as The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom and The American Fugitive in Europe.
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We Need New Names: A Novel
by NoViolet Bulawayo
Follows 10-year-old Zimbabwe native, Darling, as she escapes the closed schools and paramilitary police control of her homeland in search of opportunity and freedom with an aunt in America.
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Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler
Dana, a black woman, finds herself repeatedly transported to the antebellum South, where she must make sure that Rufus, the plantation owner's son, survives to father Dana's ancestor.
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The Emperor of Ocean Park
by Stephen L. Carter
A novel set in two privileged worlds: the upper crust African American society of the Eastern seaboard—families who summer at Martha’s Vineyard—and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school. Talcott Garland is a successful law professor, devoted father, and husband of a beautiful and ambitious woman, whose future desires may threaten the family he holds so dear. When Talcott’s father, Judge Oliver Garland, a disgraced former Supreme Court nominee, is found dead under suspicious circumstances, Talcott wonders if he may have been murdered. Guided by the elements of a mysterious puzzle that his father left, Talcott must risk his marriage, his career and even his life in his quest for justice.
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Angels Make Their Hope Here: A Novel
by Breena Clarke
After arriving in Russell's Knob, New Jersey, via the Underground Railroad, Dossie Bird experiences and enjoys a new life with the Smoot family in a racially diverse town in this new novel from the author of Cross My Heart.
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Collected Poems
by Countee Cullen
Presents a comprehensive collection of the often controversial Harlem Renaissance figure's poetry, which was marked by racial, sexual, and religious themes, in a work that includes previously uncollected and unpublished poems.
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Bud, Not Buddy
by Christopher Paul Curtis
Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father--the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.
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Autobiographies
by Frederick Douglass
The great American reformer of the nineteenth century recounts his life from a slave to a leader in the movements for emancipation and black labor.
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Frederick Douglass
by William S. McFeely
Probes beneath the public image of this important national leader to reveal a complex portrait of the man who exposed the brutal injustice of slavery and spoke loudly and clearly for the cause of freedom.
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American Smooth: Poems
by Rita Dove
This collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate pays homage to our kaleidoscopic cultural heritage; from the glorious shimmer of an operatic soprano to Bessie Smith's mournful wail; from paradise lost to angel food cake; from hotshots at the local shooting range to the Negro jazz band in World War I whose music conquered Europe before the Allied advance. Like the ballroom-dancing couple of the title poem, smiling and making the difficult seem effortless, Dove explores the shifting surfaces between perception and intimation.
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The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois
This 1903 classic is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literary history. It helped to create the intellectual argument for the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. Du Bois drew from his own experiences to develop this groundbreaking work on being African-American in American society. Souls justified the pursuit of higher education for Negroes and thus contributed to the rise of the black middle class. By describing a global color-line, Du Bois anticipated pan-Africanism and colonial revolutions in the Third World.
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Writings
by W. E. B. Du Bois
Historian, sociologist, novelist, editor, and political activist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was the most gifted and influential black intellectual of his time. Here are his essential writings, spanning a long, restless life dedicated to the struggle for racial justice. "The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade" recounts how Americans tolerated the traffic in human beings until taught by bloody civil war the consequences of moral cowardice; the essays in "The Souls of Black Folk" celebrate the strength and pride of black America, pay tribute to black music and religion, assess the career of Booker T. Washington, remember the death of an infant son; the autobiography "Dusk of Dawn" moves from a Massachusetts boyhood to the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. and emerging Pan-African consciousness. Essays and speeches from 1890 to 1958--angry and satiric, proud and mournful--show Du Bois at his freshest and most trenchant.
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W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919
by David L. Lewis
Chronicling the long career of a prime mover in America's nascent civil rights movement, a Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize-winning biography shows the major impact this great and controversial thinker had on America.
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W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963
by David L. Lewis
The second volume of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography begins with the end of World War I and chronicles the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance, the little-known political agenda behind it, Du Bois's battle for equality and justice for African Americans, and his self-exile in Ghana.
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My Soul to Take
by Tananarive Due
Bound to marry a murderous fellow immortal who an enamored human predicts will trigger an apocalypse, telepathic healer Fana works with the Life Brothers to eliminate disease throughout the world while struggling to escape her unwanted marriage. By the Essence best-selling author of Joplin's Ghost.
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The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
by Heidi W. Durrow
After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white. A first novel.
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Early Negro Writing, 1760-1837
by Dorothy Porter
A rare collection of writings with literary, social and historical importance. Narratives, poems, and essays are included, as well as documents from mutual aid and fraternal organizations.
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Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
A milestone in American literature, this book has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
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The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
by Ralph Ellison
A complete collection of essays, reviews, interviews, and criticism by the acclaimed author of Invisible Man includes the collections Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, along with newly discovered and previously uncollected works, covering such topics as literature, folklore, jazz, black culture, and the African-American experience.
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Juneteenth
by Ralph Ellison
In Washington D.C., in the 1950s, Senator Sunraider is mortally wounded by an assassin's bullet. From his deathbed, he calls out for Hickman, an old black minister. As the two men relive their memories of a shared history, they gradually reveal the secrets of their past.
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Encyclopedia of African-American Writing
by Shari Dorantes Hatch
Examines a multitude of black cultural leaders from the eighteenth century to the present as it focuses on novelists, essayists, scholars, activists, critics, teachers, poets, playwrights, and songwriters. Biographical information covers important events in a writer's life, education, major works, honors and awards, family and important associates, and more. Includes illustrations, bibliography, and index.
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Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man
by Vincent Carretta
In this widely acclaimed biography, historian Vincent Carretta gives us the authoritative portrait of Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–1797), the former slave whose 1789 autobiography quickly became a popular polemic against the slave trade and a literary classic. Equiano was the English-speaking world's most renowned person of African descent in the 1700s and is considered the founding father of both the African and the African American literary traditions.
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The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
by Ernest J. Gaines
Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane’s eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.
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A Lesson Before Dying
by Ernest J. Gaines
Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man who returns to his hometown to teach, forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, when he is asked to impart his learning and pride to the condemned man.
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Mozart and Leadbelly : Stories and Essays
by Ernest J. Gaines
A collection of short fiction and autobiographical essays from the award-winning author of A Lesson Before Dying includes five stories, set in Louisiana, that capture the joys and sorrows of rural Southern life, accompanied by prose works that chronicle his move to California at fifteen, the beginnings of his life as a writer, and the people and places he has encountered.
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The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader
by Henry Louis Gates
This primer by the Harvard University intellectual and author of the American Book Award-winning The Signifying Monkey collects three decades of his writings in a range of fields, in a volume that also offers insight into his achievements as a historian, theorist and cultural critic. From his earliest work of literary-historical excavation in 1982, through his current writings on the history and science of African American genealogy, the essays collected here follow his path as historian, theorist, canon-builder, and cultural critic, revealing a thinker of uncommon breadth whose work is uniformly guided by the drive to uncover and restore a history that has for too long been buried and denied.
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The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
by Henry Louis Gates
These remarkable volumes bring to light the voices of an important segment of the African American literary tradition with their offerings of rare works of fiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, essays, and journalism. A 30-volume set.
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City Kid: A Writer's Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success
by Nelson George
Traces the author's rise from a youth spent in Brooklyn's Brownsville housing project to a Grammy Award winner and two-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, in an account that describes his early family life, the pop culture that inspired his career, and his collaborations with such figures as Spike Lee and Chris Rock.
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Bicycles: Love Poems
by Nikki Giovanni
The acclaimed poet explores poignant and tragic experiences from the past decade of her life, from the losses of her mother and sister to the shooting at Virginia Tech, where she is a professor of English.
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The Spook Who Sat by the Door
by Sam Greenlee
An explosive, award-winning novel in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a satire of the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy. Dan Freeman, the "spook who sat by the door," is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program. Upon mastering agency tactics, however, he drops out to train young Chicago blacks as "Freedom Fighters." As a story of one man's reaction to ruling-class hypocrisy, the book is autobiographical and personal. As a tale of a man's reaction to oppression, it is universal.
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Roots
by Alex Haley
When Alex was a boy, his grandmother used to tell him stories about their family, stories that went way back to a man she called the African who was taken aboard a slave ship. As an adult, Alex spent 12 years searching for documentation that might authenticate what his grandmother had told him. In an astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered the name of the "African" - Kunta Kinte - as well as the exact location of the village in West Africa from where he was abducted in 1767. Roots is based on the facts of his ancestry, and the six generations of people descended from Kunta Kinte. Roots galvanized the nation, and created an extraordinary political, racial, social and cultural dialogue. The book sold over one million copies in the first year, and the miniseries was watched by 130 million people. It also won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
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A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
First produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and hailed as a watershed in American drama. Not only a pioneering work by an African-American playwright - Lorraine Hansberry's play was also a radically new representation of black life, resolutely authentic, fiercely unsentimental, and unflinching in its vision of what happens to people whose dreams are constantly deferred. In her portrait of an embattled Chicago family, Hansberry anticipated issues that range from generational clashes to the civil rights and women's movements. She also posed the essential questions - about identity, justice, and moral responsibility - at the heart of these great struggles. The result is an American classic.
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Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s
by
Leads off with Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), a unique fusion of fiction, poetry, and drama rooted in Toomer's experiences as a teacher in Georgia. Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928), whose freewheeling, impressionistic, bawdy kaleidoscope of Jazz Age nightlife made it a best seller, traces the picaresque adventures of Jake, a World War I veteran, within and beyond Harlem. Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) is the psychological portrait of a woman caught between the two worlds of her mixed Scandinavian and African American heritage. Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun (1928) is richly detailed account of a young art student's struggles to advance her career in a society full of obstacles both overt and insidiously concealed; and Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929), with its provocative look at prejudice and exclusion, tells of a new arrival in Harlem searching for love.
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Harlem Renaissance: Four Novels of the 1930s
by
Traces the flowering of the Renaissance in diverse genres and forms. It opens with Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter (1931), an elegantly realized coming-of-age tale that follows a young man from his rural origins to the big city. Suffused with childhood memories, it is the poet's only novel. George S. Schuyler's Black No More (1931), a satire founded on the science fiction premise of a wonder drug permitting blacks to change their race, skewers public figures white and black alike in a raucous, carnivalesque send-up of American racial attitudes. Considered the first detective story by an African American writer, Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies (1932) is a mystery that comically mixes and reverses stereotypes, placing a Harvard-educated African "conjureman" at the center of a phantasmagoric charade of deaths and disappearances. Black Thunder (1936), Arna Bontemps's stirring fictional recreation of Gabriel Prosser's 1800 slave revolt, which, though unsuccessful, shook Jefferson's Virginia to its core, marks a turn from aestheticism toward political militancy in its exploration of African American history.
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Lighthead
by Terrance Hayes
In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presentation format. This innovative collection presents the light-headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.
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Someone Knows My Name
by Lawrence Hill
Kidnapped at the age of 11 by British slavers, Aminata survives the Middle Passage and is reunited in South Carolina with Chekura, a boy from a village near hers. Her story gets entwined with his, and with those of her owners: nasty indigo producer Robinson Appleby and, later, Jewish duty inspector Solomon Lindo. During her long life of struggle, she does what she can to free herself and others from slavery, including learning to read and teaching others to, and befriending anyone who can help her, black or white.
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A Rage in Harlem
by Chester B. Himes
A Rage in Harlem is a ripping introduction to Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, patrolling New York City’s roughest streets in Chester Himes’s groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series. For love of fine, wily Imabelle, hapless Jackson surrenders his life savings to a con man who knows the secret of turning ten-dollar bills into hundreds—and then he steals from his boss, only to lose the stolen money at a craps table. Luckily for him, he can turn to his savvy twin brother, Goldy, who earns a living—disguised as a Sister of Mercy—by selling tickets to Heaven in Harlem. With Goldy on his side, Jackson is ready for payback.
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Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor
by Paul Beatty
A sampling of humorous African-American writings is comprised of poetry, prose, political speeches, hip-hop, the blues, and other literary forms by Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, Harryette Mullen, Langston Hughes, Darius James, Mike Tyson, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others.
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Five Plays
by Langston Hughes
Tambourines to Glory, Soul Gone Home, Little Ham, Mulatto, and Simply Heavenly reflect the black author's and social activist's concerns.
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The Dream Keeper and Other Poems
by Langston Hughes
The Dream Keeper, the great African-American writer Langston Hughes's only collection of poems for children, includes some of his best loved works. This hardcover edition, filled with elegant scratchboard illustrations by Caldecott Honor winner Brian Pinkey, celebrates the colloquial and complex works of one of this country's most important African American authors.
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Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten
by Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes is widely remembered as a celebrated star of the Harlem Renaissance -- a writer whose bluesy, lyrical poems and novels still have broad appeal. What's less well known about Hughes is that for much of his life he maintained a friendship with Carl Van Vechten, a flamboyant white critic, writer, and photographer. Despite their differences — Van Vechten was forty-four to Hughes twenty-two when they met–Hughes’ and Van Vechten’s shared interest in black culture lead to a deeply-felt, if unconventional friendship that would span some forty years. Between them they knew everyone — from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright, and their letters are filled with gossip about the antics of the great and the forgotten, as well as with talk that ranged from race relations to blues lyrics to the nightspots of Harlem, which they both loved to prowl.
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The Life of Langston Hughes
by Arnold Rampersad
A highly-praised biography of an extraordinary and prolific American writer. In young adulthood Hughes, possessed a nomadic but dedicated spirit that led him to countless stops around the globe. Associating with political activists, patrons, and fellow artists, and drawing inspiration from both Walt Whitman and the vibrant Afro-American culture, Hughes soon became the most original and revered of black poets. This biography offers a new generation of readers entrance to the life and mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest artists.
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Their Eyes were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston's beloved 1937 classic is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose.
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Novels and Stories
by Zora Neale Hurston
Features the novels Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jonah's Gourd Vine, Moses Man of the Mountain, Seraph on the Suwanee, and selected stories. Includes a newly researched chronology of Hurston's life, detailed notes, and a brief essay on the texts.
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Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston
by Valerie Boyd
A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Wrapped in Rainbows illuminates the adventures, complexities, and sorrows of Hurston's life -- her youth in the country's first incorporated all-black town, her friendships with luminaries such as Langston Hughes, her sexuality and short-lived marriages, and her mysterious relationship with vodou. With the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II as historical backdrops, Wrapped in Rainbows not only positions Hurston's work in her time but also offers implications for our own.
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I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives
by Yuval Taylor
Between 1760 and 1902, more than 200 book-length autobiographies of ex-slaves were published; together they form the basis for all subsequent African American literature. I Was Born a Slave collects the 20 most significant “slave narratives.” They describe whippings, torture, starvation, resistance, and hairbreadth escapes; slave auctions, kidnappings, and murders; sexual abuse, religious confusion, the struggle of learning to read and write; and the triumphs and difficulties of life as free men and women. This unprecedented anthology presents them unabridged, providing each one with helpful introductions and annotations, to form the most comprehensive volume ever assembled on the lives and writings of the slaves.
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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
by Harriet A. Jacobs
Here is one of the few slave narratives written by a woman. Harriet Jacobs was owned by a brutal master who beat his slaves regularly and subjected them to indignations that were far worse. Jacobs eventually escaped her master and moved to a northern state. Though she was unable to take her children with her at the time, they were later reunited. Read her powerful and compelling story.
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Pym
by Mat Johnson
Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes has just made a startling discovery: the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that confirms the reality of Edgar Allan Poe’s strange and only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Determined to seek out Tsalal, the remote island of pure and utter blackness that Poe describes, Jaynes convenes an all-black crew of six to follow Pym’s trail to the South Pole, armed with little but the firsthand account from which Poe derived his seafaring tale, a bag of bones, and a stash of Little Debbie snack cakes. Thus begins an epic journey by an unlikely band of adventurers under the permafrost of Antarctica, beneath the surface of American history, and behind one of literature’s great mysteries. A comic reimagining of America's racial history by a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award-winning writer.
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Silver Sparrow
by Tayari Jones
Dana Yarboro's father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist. Though both Dana and her mother have always known this, James goes to great lengths to protect his other, first family from the truth. And despite her mother's tendency to spy on the other wife, Dana is kept from her half-sister by the simple rule that Chaurisse picks first (summer camp, summer job, college), and Dana gets what's left. After the two meet accidentally and Dana pursues a friendship with her unsuspecting half-sister, James' secrets inevitably unravel. Set in Atlanta's middle-class African-American community in the 1980s, this novel and its complex, believable characters are likely to appeal as much to teenage girls as to their grown-up counterparts.
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Virgin Soul
by Judy Juanita
Pursuing an education, relationships and a part-time job in 1960s San Francisco, Geniece becomes a militant member of the Black Panther movement and its dangerous world of weapons, FBI agents, freewheeling sex and violent uprisings against a backdrop of Huey Newton's imprisonment. A first novel.
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Lucy
by Jamaica Kincaid
Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. Lewis and Mariah are handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Yet, almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade. With mingled anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the assumptions and verities of her employers' world and compares them with the vivid realities of her native place. At the same time, Lucy is coming of age, unfolding into a passionate, forthright, and disarmingly honest person.
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To Be a Slave
by Julius Lester
A compilation, selected from various sources and arranged chronologically, of the reminiscences of slaves and ex-slaves about their experiences from the leaving of Africa through the Civil War and into the early twentieth century.
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The Best of All Possible Worlds
by Karen Lord
When their homeland is destroyed, the survivors of a proud and aloof alien society struggle to reach out to the rest of the galaxy for aid and understanding while striving to preserve their cherished way of life, a situation that leads to an unexpected bond between an alien man and a human woman. By the award-winning author of Redemption in Indigo.
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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
by Ayana Mathis
In 1925, 15-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees her native Georgia and settles in Philadelphia. By age 16, she's stuck in a disappointing marriage to an unreliable man as she bitterly mourns the deaths of her firstborn twins. Although Hattie goes on to bear and raise nine more children, her determination to prepare them for the worst that the world has to offer takes precedence over maternal tenderness. Unfolding in 12 interlinked sections, each from the point of view of a different character, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie follows the (mis)fortunes of one African-American family through the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Era, and into the latter years of the 20th century.
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The Good Lord Bird
by James McBride
Mistaken for a girl on account of his curly hair, delicate features, and sackcloth smock, 12-year-old slave Henry Shackleford realizes that his accidental disguise affords him greater safety and decides to remain female. Dubbed "Little Onion" by his liberator, abolitionist John Brown, Henry accompanies the increasingly fanatical Brown on his crusade to end slavery -- a picaresque journey that takes them from Bloody Kansas to Rochester, New York, where they attempt to enlist the support of such notables as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman before embarking on the infamous, ill-fated 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
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How Stella Got Her Groove Back
by Terry McMillan
Stella Payne is forty-two, divorced, a high-powered investment analyst, mother of eleven-year-old Quincy- and she does it all. In fact, if she doesn't do it, it doesn't get done. So what if there's been no one to share her bed with lately, let alone rock her world? Stella doesn't mind it too much; she probably wouldn't have the energy for love. But when Stella takes a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Jamaica, her world gets rocked to the core - not just by the relaxing effects of the sun and sea and an island full of attractive men, but by one man in particular. He's tall, lean, soft-spoken, Jamaican, smells of citrus and the ocean - and is half her age. The tropics have cast their spell and Stella soon realizes she has come to a cataclysmic juncture: not only must she confront her hopes and fears about love, she must question all of her expectations, passions, and ideas about life and the way she has lived it.
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Waiting to Exhale
by Terry McMillan
Four African-American women console and support one another in a complex friendship that helps each of them face the middle of their lives as single women. Savannah Jackson is single, and weary of men who can't make the transition from boyfriend to husband. Bernadine Harris is suddenly single - her husband has left her for a 24-year-old white woman. Marilyn Stokes is on the rebound, regretting the years she wasted on a dead-end relationship and mourning her recent miscarriage. And Gloria Matthews, a single mother whose 16-year-old son has just discovered sex, has spent most of her adult life driving men away with her none-too-subtle hunger for marriage.
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God Don't Like Ugly
by Mary Monroe
Frightened and ashamed, budding teenager Annette Goode, a shy, awkward, overweight girl hides the devastating secret that her mother's boarder has been sexually abusing her, until her life is changed forever by the beautiful and worldly Rhoda Nelson. First in a series.
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The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
by Edward Kelsey Moore
Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean have been friends since their childhood in the same Southern Indiana town in the 1960s. They've kept their friendship going through regular meals at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat, the town's first black-owned business. Nicknamed the Supremes, the three African-American women have been through a lot over the past 40 years, from racial tensions in the town to more direct problems like loss and betrayal in their personal lives, but through it all they've kept their sanity (mostly) and sense of humor. Emphasizing the bonds of friendship between three imperfect but unforgettable women over the decades, this witty, lively debut will appeal to fans of novels as different as Larry McMurtry's Terms of Endearment and Kathryn Stockett's The Help.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.
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Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Macon Dead, Jr., called "Milkman," the son of the wealthiest African American in town, moves from childhood into early manhood, searching, among the disparate, mysterious members of his family, for his life and reality. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Reader's Guide available.
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Devil in a Blue Dress
by Walter Mosley
Easy Rawlins, a tough World War II veteran and detective, is hired by a financier and gangster to locate Daphne Monet, a search that leads him from elegant boardrooms to the raucous jazz joints of late 1940s Los Angeles.
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Black Authors and Illustrators of Books for Children and Young Adults
by Barbara Thrash Murphy
A biographical dictionary that provides comprehensive coverage of all major authors and illustrators – past and present. As the only reference volume of its kind available, this book is a valuable research tool that provides quick access for anyone studying black children’s literature – whether one is a student, a librarian charged with maintaining a children’s literature collection, or a scholar of children’s literature.
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Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices
by Walter Dean Myers
Acclaimed writer Walter Dean Myers celebrates the people of Harlem with these powerful and soulful first-person poems in the voices of the residents who make up the legendary neighborhood: basketball players, teachers, mail carriers, jazz artists, maids, veterans, nannies, students, and more. Exhilarating and electric, these poems capture the energy and resilience of a neighborhood and a people.
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The Women of Brewster Place
by Gloria Naylor
Once the home of poor Irish and Italian immigrants, Brewster Place, a rotting tenement on a dead-end street, now shelters black families. This novel portrays the courage, the fear, and the anguish of some of the women there who hold their families together, trying to make a home. Among them are: Mattie Michael, the matriarch who loses her son to prison; Etta Mae Johnson who tries to trade the 'high life' for marriage with a local preacher; Kiswana Browne who leaves her middle-class family to organize a tenant's union.
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Twelve Years a Slave
by Solomon Northup
Born a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841. He spent the next twelve harrowing years of his life as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. During this time he was frequently abused and often afraid for his life. After regaining his freedom in 1853, Northup decided to publish this gripping autobiographical account of his captivity. As an educated man, Northup was able to present an exceptionally detailed and accurate description of slave life and plantation society. Indeed, this book is probably the fullest, most realistic picture of the 'peculiar institution' during the three decades before the Civil War.
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The Norton Anthology of African American Literature
by Henry Louis Gates
An anthology of the work of 120 writers spanning two centuries, this book covers the earliest known work by an African American, Lucy Terry's poem "Bars Fight", to the writing of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and Poet Laureate Rita Dove. It begins with blues, gospel, spirituals, rap, sermons, prayers, testimonies and speeches, and continues with writing of all genres: poetry, short fiction, novels, drama, autobiography, journals and letters, including the full text of 11 major works.
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Notable African American Writers
by Salem Press
Profiles eighty African American writers, including such authors as Maya Angelou and Al Young, providing analysis of each writer's themes and listing each author's works, awards, and biographical information.
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Montaro Caine
by Sidney Poitier
A first novel by the Presidential Medal of Freedom-winning actor and author of Life Beyond Measure follows the experiences of a corporate CEO who, two decades after discovering a coin made of materials not known on Earth, finds his views on faith, race and the meaning of life challenged by a wrenching battle for ownership of the coin.
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Early Negro Writing, 1760-1837
by Dorothy Porter
A rare collection of writings with literary, social and historical importance. Narratives, poems, and essays are included, as well as documents from mutual aid and fraternal organizations.
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New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006
by Ishmael Reed
Culled from four decades of writing, a volume of multicultural poetry offers insight into the MacArthur fellow's spiritual and political beliefs as well as his journeys throughout America, Japan, Africa, and other regions, in an anthology that includes pieces on such topics as war, prejudice, and George W. Bush.
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The Plays
by Ishmael Reed
An anthology of the Otto-winning writer's plays offers insight into his use of historical, political, and social satire, in a collection that includes such works as "Body Parts," "Mother Hubbard," and "The Preacher and the Rapper."
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Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood
by
An anthology of short fiction, poems, and personal essays by top African-American women shares their experiences as mothers and daughters in their homes and communities, in a volume that includes contributions by Alice Walker, Faith Ringgold, and Maya Angelou.
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Push
by Sapphire
A courageous and determined young teacher opens up a new world of hope and redemption for sixteen-year-old Precious Jones, an abused young African American girl living in Harlem who was raped and left pregnant by her father. This modern classic was the inspiration for the film Precious. To continue the story, check out the sequel, The Kid.
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Ghana Must Go
by Taiye Selasi
The sudden and unexpected death of a renowned surgeon in Ghana has rippling repercussions on his family, both from his first marriage and his second, as truths are uncovered and betrayals are exposed, ultimately bringing everyone closer together.
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For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf
by Ntozake Shange
From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing . . . every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” this groundbreaking dramatic prose poem is written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
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Forty Acres
by Dwayne Smith
Befriended by some of America's most successful and wealthy black men, a talented African-American lawyer working out of a Queens storefront accepts their invitation to a weekend getaway only to learn that they are part of a secret organization that would promote white slavery. A first novel.
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Red River
by Lalita Tademy
The lives of three generations of two African-American families intertwine in the tumultuous and bloody aftermath of the Civil War as newly freed slaves fight for their individual liberties as they struggle to build new lives in The Bottom, a poor settlement just down Red River from Colfax, Louisiana.
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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
by Mildred D. Taylor
Facing a year of night riders and burnings, Cassie and her family continue their struggle to keep their land and hold onto what rightfully belongs to them, despite the difficult battles they must continue to endure. Winner of the Newbery Medal.
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Saint Monkey: A Novel
by Jacinda Townsend
Two friends from the mountains of eastern Kentucky try to retain their friendship when one of them is invited to play the Apollo with a jazz group while the other sinks lower in her poor, backward, backwoods life.
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Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol
by Nell Irvin Painter
Sojourner Truth: ex-slave and fiery abolitionist, figure of imposing physique, riveting preacher and spellbinding singer who dazzled listeners with her wit and originality. Straight-talking and unsentimental, Truth became a national symbol for strong black women--indeed, for all strong women. Like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, she is regarded as a radical of immense and enduring influence; yet, unlike them, what is remembered of her consists more of myth than of personality. Eminent black historian Nell Irvin Painter goes beyond the myths, words, and photographs to uncover the life of a complex woman who was born into slavery and died a legend. Inspired by religion, Truth transformed herself from a domestic servant named Isabella into an itinerant Pentecostal preacher; her words of empowerment have inspired black women and poor people the world over to this day. As an abolitionist and a feminist, Truth defied the notion that slaves were male and women were white.
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The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Reading this novel, which is written as a series of letters, is much like reading someone's diary, so personal are the entries and so complete the writer's transformation. Fourteen when the book opens, Celie is a young black teen abused (physically, sexually, and emotionally) by her father, who takes away her children and marries her off to a man who doesn't treat her much better. It is through this man's mistress, however, that Celie finds the courage to educate herself, to stand up for herself, and to demand to be treated as a human being. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple is a difficult but nevertheless inspiring read.
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Alice Walker: A Life
by Evelyn C. White
A full-length portrait of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer draws on letters, journals, and interviews to discuss her birth into a family of Georgia sharecroppers, the childhood accident that left her blind in one eye and sympathetic to human suffering, her activism during the 1960s, and her literary achievements.
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Salvage the Bones
by Jesmyn Ward
Winner of the 2011 National Book Award. A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch, fourteen and pregnant, and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
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The Wedding
by Dorothy West
Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, offers an intimate glimpse into African American middle class. Set on bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, The Wedding tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie. Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society," we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community. With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.
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The Piano Lesson
by August Wilson
.In this Pulitzer Prize-winning play, brother is pitted against sister over the fate of their heirloom piano. The Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, the piano has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.
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Brown Girl Dreaming
by Jacqueline Woodson
In vivid poems that reflect the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, an award-winning author shares what it was like to grow up in the 1960s and 1970s in both the North and the South.
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Black Boy: American Hunger: A Record of Childhood and Youth
by Richard Wright
Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi amid poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those around him; at six he was a "drunkard," hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. This powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment—a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering.
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Early Works
by Richard Wright
Native Son, the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in the raw, noisy, crowded slums of Chicago's South Side, captured the hopes and yearnings, the pain and rage of black Americans. The text printed in this volume restores the changes and cuts that Wright was forced to make. This volume also contains Wright's first novel, Lawd Today! and his collection of stories, Uncle Tom's Children. Lawd Today! interweaves news bulletins, songs, exuberant wordplay, and scenes of confrontation and celebration into a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the events of one day—February 12—in the life of a black Chicago postal worker. In Uncle Tom's Children, the characters in these tales struggle to survive the cruelty of racism in the South. Wright's autobiographical essay "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" is also included.
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Native Son
by Richard Wright
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what it means to be black in America.
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Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen
by Jennifer Jensen Wallach
Born into poverty, Richard Wright managed to complete only an eighth-grade education. Yet by at the age of 33, he was the best-selling author of what would become an American classic, Native Son. Before dying prematurely at the age of fifty-two, he published nearly a dozen books and left behind hundreds of unpublished manuscript pages. This biography traces Wright's life, while he attempted to answer the question, "How can I live freely?"
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Michigan City Public Library
100 E. 4th Street
Michigan City, Indiana 46360
219-873-3044
http://mclib.org/
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