African American literature, body of literature written by Americans of African descent.
Beginning in the pre-Revolutionary War period, African American writers have engaged in a creative, if often contentious, dialogue with American letters. The result is a literature rich in expressive subtlety and social insight, offering illuminating assessments of American identities and history. Although since 1970 African American writers, led by Toni Morrison, have earned widespread critical acclaim, this literature has been recognized internationally as well as nationally since its inception in the late 18th century.
Antebellum literature
African Americans launched their literature in North America during the second half of the 18th century, joining the war of words between England and its rebellious colonies with a special sense of mission. The earliest African American writers sought to demonstrate that the proposition “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence required that black Americans be extended the same human rights as those claimed by white Americans. Couching a social justice argument in the Christian gospel of the universal brotherhood of humanity, African-born Phillis Wheatley, enslaved in Boston, dedicated her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first African American book, to proving that “Negros, black as Cain,” were not inherently inferior to whites in matters of the spirit and thus could “join th’ angelic train” as spiritual equals to whites. Composing poems in a wide range of classical genres, Wheatley was determined to show by her mastery of form and metre, as well as by her pious and learned subjects, that a black poet was as capable of artistic expression as a white poet. Poems on Various Subjects provided a powerful argument against the proslavery contention that the failure of African peoples to write serious literature was proof of their intellectual inadequacies and their fitness for enslavement. The poetry and sermons of the Connecticut slave Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806?), though their major theme is the urgency of Christian conversion, buttressed the demand of early African American writers for literary recognition.
In 1789 Olaudah Equiano, Wheatley’s most famous black literary contemporary, published his two-volume autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. A British citizen who had experienced enslavement in the Americas, Equiano has been traditionally regarded, along with Wheatley, as the founder of African literature in English by virtue of his having pioneered the slave narrative, a firsthand literary testimony against slavery which, by the early 19th century, earned for African American literature a burgeoning readership in Britain as well as in the United States. One of the most remarkable features of Equiano’s story is his use of African origins to establish his credibility as a critic of European imperialism in Africa. Recent research, however, has raised questions about whether Equiano was born an Igbo (Ibo) in Africa, as he claims in his autobiography. His baptismal record in Westminster, England, lists him on February 9, 1759, as “Gustavus Vassa a Black born in Carolina 12 years old.” Scholars have also debated whether Equiano’s account of Igbo life in his autobiography is based on reading rather than memory. In the absence of scholarly consensus on these controversial matters, The Interesting Narrative remains a pivotal text in portraying Africa as neither morally benighted nor culturally backward but rather as a model of social harmony defiled by Euro-American greed.
In the early 19th century, the standard-bearers of African American literature spoke with heightening urgency of the need for whites to address the terrible sin of slavery. Through essays, poetry, and fiction as well as more conventional journalism, African American newspapers, inaugurated by Freedom’s Journal in 1827, extolled the achievements of black people worldwide while lobbying persistently for an end to slavery. As the prophet of literary black nationalism in the United States, David Walker wrote his incendiary Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) to warn white America of impending racial violence if slavery were not abolished. Echoing Walker, who was a fellow Bostonian, Maria W. Stewart, the first African American woman political writer, issued her Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart in 1835, in which she encouraged black women in the North to take a more outspoken role in civil rights agitation and black community building. A year after the publication of Stewart’s Productions, Jarena Lee, a domestic servant impelled by a call to preach, published The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, the first spiritual autobiography by an African American woman.
Slave narratives In the wake of the bloody Nat Turner rebellion in Southampton county, Virginia, in 1831, an increasingly fervent antislavery movement in the United States sponsored firsthand autobiographical accounts of slavery by fugitives from the South in order to make abolitionists of a largely indifferent white Northern readership. From 1830 to the end of the slavery era, the fugitive slave narrative dominated the literary landscape of antebellum black America. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) gained the most attention, establishing Frederick Douglass as the leading African American man of letters of his time. By predicating his struggle for freedom on his solitary pursuit of literacy, education, and independence, Douglass portrayed himself as a self-made man, which appealed strongly to middle-class white Americans. In his second, revised autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass depicted himself as a product of a slave community in Maryland’s Eastern Shore and explained how his struggles for independence and liberty did not end when he reached the so-called “free states” of the North. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, candidly describes her experience of the sexual exploitation that made slavery especially oppressive for black women. Chronicling what she called “the war” of her life, which ultimately won both her own freedom and that of her two children, Jacobs proved the inadequacy of the image of victim that had been applied pervasively to female slaves. Her work and the antislavery and feminist oratory of the New York ex-slave who renamed herself Sojourner Truth enriched early African American literature with unprecedented models of female eloquence and heroism.
Prose, drama, and poetryThrough the slave narrative, African Americans entered the world of prose and dramatic literature. In 1853 William Wells Brown, an internationally known fugitive slave narrator, authored the first black American novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter. It tells the tragic story of the beautiful light-skinned African American daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress; Clotel dies trying to save her own daughter from slavery. Five years later Brown also published the first African American play, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, based on scenes and themes familiar to readers of fugitive slave narratives. In the late 1850s Martin R. Delany, a black journalist and physician who would later serve as a major in the Union army during the Civil War, wrote Blake; or, The Huts of America (serially published in 1859), a novel whose hero plots a slave revolt in the South. In 1859 the first African American women’s fiction appeared: “The Two Offers,” a short story by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper dealing with middle-class women whose race is not specified, and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, an autobiographical novel about the life of a working-class black woman in the North. The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002), an apparently fictionalized slave narrative discovered in manuscript in the early 21st century, also may be among the earliest contributions to African American women’s fiction, but the identity of its author, Hannah Crafts, has yet to be confirmed. Harper, by contrast, was renowned in mid-19th-century black America as the poetic voice of her people, a writer whose verse was direct, impassioned, and poignant. She and James M. Whitfield, author of a volume of spirited protest poetry entitled America and Other Poems (1853), helped ensure that the 1850s would become the first African American literary renaissance.
Oral tradition Behind the achievements of individual African American writers during the antislavery era lies the communal consciousness of millions of slaves, whose oral tradition in song and story has given form and substance to much subsequent literature by black Americans. Douglass recalled that the plantation spiritual “Run to Jesus” had first suggested to him the thought of making his escape from slavery. When slaves sang “I thank God I’m free at last,” only they knew whether they were referring to freedom from sin or from slavery. A second great fund of Southern black folklore, the beast fables that originated in Africa testified to the slaves’ commonsense understanding of human psychology and everyday justice. The slaves selected for special celebration trickster figures, most notably Brer Rabbit, because of their facility in combating stronger antagonists through wit, guile, and the skillful adoption of deceptive masks.
The Civil War and Reconstruction
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their voices to convince President Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war to end slavery, which black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight. This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 black soldiers joining the Union army. Charlotte Forten, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most black Americans when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from slavery in St. Louis to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent ex-slave in the person of Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-conscious black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century. Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular American literature, which middle-class black writers often imitated, to a real-world sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that highlighted the centrality of educated black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among black readers with two book-length epic poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in Spenserian stanzas.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
On August 25, 1893, Whitman shared the platform for African American literature at the Chicago World’s Fair with a 21-year-old Ohioan named Paul Laurence Dunbar, who had just that year published his first volume of poetry, Oak and Ivy. Though not the first black American to write poetry in so-called Negro dialect, Dunbar was by far the most successful, both critically and financially. Deeply ambivalent about his white readers’ preference for what he called “a jingle in a broken tongue,” Dunbar wrote a great deal of verse in standard diction and form, including a handful of lyrics, such as “We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy,” and “The Haunted Oak,” that testify candidly and movingly to his frustrated aspirations as a black poet in a white supremacist era. The first professional African American writer, Dunbar also authored a large body of fiction, including four novels, the most important of which—The Sport of the Gods (1901)—offered a bleak view of African American prospects in urban America that anticipated the work of Richard Wright.
The novel as social analysis
While most of Dunbar’s fiction was designed primarily to entertain his white readers, in the hands of Harper, Sutton E. Griggs, and Charles W. Chesnutt, the novel became an instrument of social analysis and direct confrontation with the prejudices, stereotypes, and racial mythologies that allowed whites to ignore worsening social conditions for blacks in the last decades of the 19th century. Harper’s Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) attempted to counter specious notions of slavery popularized by white writers who idealized plantation life, while offering models of socially committed middle-class African Americans who exemplify the ideals of uplift that motivated much of Harper’s writing. Griggs, a Baptist minister who wrote five novels and founded a publishing company, excoriated racism in his fiction, stressing the need for his educated middle-class heroes and heroines to turn away from whiteness as a standard of value and rely instead on self-determination and racial solidarity. Unlike Harper and Griggs, whose fiction won few readers outside black communities, Chesnutt attracted the backing of prestigious publishing houses in Boston and New York. Between 1899 and 1905 he published two books of short stories and three novels of purpose that addressed the causes and consequences of racial problems in the postwar South. Based on the Wilmington, North Carolina, racial massacre of 1898, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) was reviewed extensively throughout the United States as a timely study of troubling contemporary issues, but its commercial success was limited, probably because of its unsparing assessment of white supremacy.
Booket T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois
As segregation regimes took hold in the South in the 1890s with the tacit approval of the rest of the country, many African Americans found a champion in Booker T. Washington and adopted his self-help autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), as their guidebook to improved fortunes. Washington portrayed his own life in such a way as to suggest that even the most disadvantaged of black people could attain dignity and prosperity in the South by proving themselves valuable, productive members of society deserving of fair and equal treatment before the law. A classic American success story, Up from Slavery solidified Washington’s reputation as the most eminent African American of the new century. Yet Washington’s primacy was soon challenged. In his landmark collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a professor of sociology at Atlanta University, disputed the main principle of Washington’s political program, the idea that voting and civil rights were less important to black progress than acquiring property and achieving economic self-sufficiency. Unlike Washington, who foresaw the steady obliteration of racial prejudice and discrimination, Du Bois prophesied in the opening lines of The Souls of Black Folk: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” An uncompromising advocate of civil and voting rights, Du Bois asserted in The Souls of Black Folk that through “work, culture, and liberty” the dual heritage of African Americans—what he called “double-consciousness”—could be melded into a force for positive social and cultural change in the United States. Du Bois’s striving to dramatize in his narrator a synthesis of racial and national consciousness dedicated to “the ideal of human brotherhood” made The Souls of Black Folk one of the most provocative and influential works of African American literature in the 20th century.
The rise of the New Negro
During the first two decades of the 20th century, rampant racial injustices, led by weekly reports of grisly lynchings, gave strong impetus to protest writing. From the editor’s desk of the Colored American Magazine, Pauline E. Hopkins wrote novels, short stories, editorials, and social commentary in the early 1900s that attempted to revive the fervour of the antislavery era. The founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 in New York City put Du Bois in charge of its organ, The Crisis, which, as its editor from 1910 to 1934, he fashioned into the most widely read African American magazine of its time. In 1912 future NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson, poet, diplomat, and journalist, published anonymously The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a psychological novel that employed the theme of passing for white to explore the double consciousness of its protagonist with a dispassionate objectivity unattempted in African American fiction up to that time. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, Harlem was well on its way to becoming what Johnson called “the greatest Negro city in the world,” attracting key intellectual leaders and artists such as Du Bois and Johnson, not to mention thousands of migrants from the South and Midwest whose talents and aspirations would fuel in the 1920s the second great renaissance of African American culture.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an anthology edited by Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to black writing on the part of major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favour and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few, until well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry. Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and file of black America and proudly identified themselves as black poets, Cullen sought success through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to the folk sermon tradition of Southern blacks.
NovelistsMcKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade. Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and colour prejudice among black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929) exposes colour prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality. The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the black female protagonists of her novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern black community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
Playwrights and editors
Although the most memorable literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance was in narrative prose and poetry, the movement also inspired dramatists such as Willis Richardson, whose The Chip Woman’s Fortune (produced 1923) was the first nonmusical play by an African American to be produced on Broadway. African American editors such as Charles S. Johnson, whose monthly Opportunity was launched in 1923 under the auspices of the National Urban League, and the respected Caribbean-born short-story writer Eric Walrond, who published young black writers in Negro World, the organ of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, provided significant visibility for New Negro writers. Anthologies, particularly of poetry, abounded during the Harlem Renaissance, enhancing the literary reputations of both the writers represented in them and their editors. The editors included James Weldon Johnson (The Book of American Negro Poetry [1922] and The Book of American Negro Spirituals [1925, 1926]), Charles S. Johnson (Ebony and Topaz [1927]), and Cullen (Caroling Dusk [1927]), to mention only a handful of the most noteworthy.
The advent of urban realism
Despite the enormous outpouring of creativity during the 1920s, the vogue of black writing, black art, and black culture waned markedly in the early 1930s as the Great Depression took hold in the United States. African American pundits in the 1930s and ’40s tended to depreciate the achievements of the New Negroes, calling instead for a more politically engaged, socially critical realism in literature.
Richard Wright The chief proponent of this position was Richard Wright, whose fiction, autobiography, and social commentary dominated African American literature from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. A migrant from Mississippi with barely a ninth-grade education, Wright set the tone for the post-New Negro era with Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), a collection of novellas set in the Jim Crow South that evidenced Wright’s strong affinity with Marxism and the influence of American Naturalist writers such as Theodore Dreiser. In 1940 Wright’s monumental novel Native Son appeared, winning thunderous critical acclaim as well as unprecedented financial success. Charting the violent life and death of a Chicago ghetto youth, Native Son revived the protest tradition of 19th-century African American literature while eschewing its moralizing, sentimentality, and political conservatism. Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945) also revisited a 19th-century tradition, the slave narrative, to chronicle his quest, as much intellectual as physical, from an oppressive South to anticipated freedom in Chicago. After the critical and popular success of Black Boy in the mid-1940s, Wright moved to Paris, where he continued to publish fiction and travel books, though none matched the achievement of his work in the 1940s. Nevertheless, the stamp Wright placed on African American prose remained evident in the work of novelists such as William Attaway, Chester Himes, and Ann Petry, which has often been interpreted as belonging to “the Wright school” of social realism. Petry’s The Street (1946) adopted Wright’s pitiless assessment of the power of environment in the lives of black urban dwellers, but, unlike Wright, whose female characters generally exemplify demoralization and passivity, Petry created a female protagonist who fights back.
Chicago writers
The Chicago Defender, one of the premier African American newspapers of the 20th century, portrayed the Windy City as a cultural and economic mecca for black migrants fleeing the South during the Great Depression. Wright, who moved from Memphis, Tennessee, to Chicago in 1927, found in the South Side of Chicago a lively community of young African American writers, among them poet Margaret Walker, playwright Theodore Ward, poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis, and novelist and children’s book author Arna Bontemps. Chicago-based Abbott’s Monthly (1930–33), established by the Defender’s editor, Robert Abbott, published the work of Wright and Himes for the first time, while New Challenge (1937), coedited by novelist Dorothy West and Wright, helped the fledgling Chicago black literary renaissance expound its purpose. In the 1940s Negro Digest and Negro Story, also literary products of Chicago’s South Side, provided outlets for fiction writers, poets, and essayists. Encouraged by the Chicago and New York units of the Federal Theater Project, African American drama advanced during the Depression, led by Abram Hill, founder of the American Negro Theater in Harlem; Hughes, whose play Mulatto (produced 1935) reached Broadway with a searching examination of miscegenation; and Ward, whose Big White Fog (produced 1938) was the most widely viewed African American drama of the period.
The 1940s
During the 1930s and ’40s Hughes and Sterling A. Brown kept the folk spirit alive in African American poetry. An admirer of Hughes, Margaret Walker dedicated For My People (1942), the title poem of which remains one of the most popular texts for recitation and performance in African American literature, to the same black American rank and file whom Hughes and Brown celebrated. By the early 1940s three figures, Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, and Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks, were showing how the vernacular tradition could be adapted to modernist experimentation. The variety of expressiveness and formal innovation in African American poetry of the 1940s is reflected in Tolson’s densely allusive Rendezvous with America (1942), Hayden’s meditative history poems such as “Middle Passage” (1945) and “Frederick Douglass” (1947), and Brooks’s tribute to the vitality and rigours of black urban life in A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and her Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Annie Allen (1949). The 1940s was also a decade of creative experimentation in autobiography, led by Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn (1940), a self-styled “essay toward an autobiography of a race concept”; Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), an early venture in “autoethnography,” the writing of self via the characterization of a culture (in this case, the rural Southern black culture of Hurston’s roots); J. Saunders Redding’s No Day of Triumph (1942), the story of an alienated Northern professional’s quest for redemptive immersion in Southern black working-class communities; and Wright’s Black Boy.
Ralph Ellison In 1949 the young New York essayist James Baldwin, a protégé of Wright, published “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” a criticism of protest fiction from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Native Son. Baldwin’s charge that the protest novel was prone to categorize humanity rather than reflect its full “beauty, dread, and power” heralded a shift in the 1950s away from Wright’s brand of realism. The most enduring African American novel of the 1950s, Invisible Man (1952), by another Wright protégé, Ralph Ellison, answered Baldwin’s call for “a new act of creation,” a new kind of black hero, and a new way of picturing that hero’s participation in post-Depression, post-World War II American reality. The protagonist of Ellison’s novel is an unnamed black everyman who makes the traditional journey in African American literature from the South to the North, where he goes in search of conventional success and ends up, through a series of ironic revelations, discovering himself. The Invisible Man has been called a modern Odysseus and a 20th-century Candide, in tribute to Ellison’s ability to invest in his central character a universality that bespeaks its author’s wide reading in Western myth and European, British, and American literature. But foremost the Invisible Man is a black American engaged, willy-nilly, in an often painful process of education. Part Douglass, part Washington, and part Du Bois, he struggles with the dominant “isms,” from Freudianism to Marxism, of the first half of the 20th century to decide what black intellectual leadership can and should be in the second half of the century. Encountering a volatile American reality that defies every political or philosophical attempt to define and control it, the Invisible Man comes to realize that his African American folk and cultural heritage, embodied in a series of black antagonists and enigmatic mentors, represents some of the most valuable wisdom he needs in order to discover his role and responsibilities in modern America. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953, reflecting the enormously positive critical reception the novel enjoyed. Ellison never published another novel during his lifetime, but his essays, reviews, and interviews, published as Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), acknowledged his unwavering commitment to a pluralistic ideal of art that knows no allegiance to any school or program.
James Baldwin
In 1953 Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, testified anew to the sophisticated formal experimentation and piercing examination of African American consciousness of which the writers coming of age in the 1950s were capable. The story of religious conversion experienced by 14-year-old John Grimes of Harlem, Go Tell It on the Mountain places in creative tension its hero’s spiritual awakening and his determination to gain his independence from his oppressive stepfather. The result is a novel of unprecedented honesty in its revelation of generational and gender conflicts between its central characters, who constitute an African American family haunted by self-hatred, guilt, the psychological scars of racism, unsanctioned sexual desire, and a hunger for deliverance. Two years after Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin collected his essays in Notes of a Native Son, a mix of autobiography and political commentary on race in America that identified Baldwin as the new conscience of the nation on racial matters. Subsequent volumes of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963), underlined Baldwin’s fame as the most incisive and passionate essayist ever produced by black America. His novels of the 1950s and ’60s—particularly Giovanni’s Room (1956), the first African American novel to treat homosexuality openly, and Another Country (1962), a best-seller that examined bisexuality, interracial sex, and the many prejudices that enforced hierarchies of difference in American society—confirmed Baldwin’s leadership among those black American writers at mid century who wanted to move fiction toward a renewed search for personal meaning and redemption while challenging the white American consensus that viewed triumph in World War II as a vindication of the American way on the racial home front.
African American theater
During the decade following World War II, professional African American dramatists—such as William Blackwell Branch, author of In Splendid Error (produced 1954); Alice Childress, creator of the Obie Award-winning Trouble in Mind (produced 1955); and Loften Mitchell, best known for A Land Beyond the River (produced 1957)—found greater access to the white American theatre than any previous generation of black playwrights had known. Baldwin began a dramatic career in 1955 with The Amen Corner, which focuses on a female preacher in a Harlem storefront church. Hughes continued his stage presence with his musical comedy Simply Heavenly in 1957.
But no one in African American theatre could have predicted the huge critical and popular success that came to Chicagoan Lorraine Hansberry after her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in March 1959. A searching portrayal of an African American family confronting the problems of upward mobility and integration, A Raisin in the Sun introduced not only the most brilliant playwright yet produced by black America but also an extraordinarily talented cast of African (or Bahamian, in the case of Sidney Poitier) American actors, including Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Lou Gossett, Jr., and the play’s director, Lloyd Richards, the first black director of a Broadway show in more than 50 years. Hansberry’s play was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959; she was the first African American writer to win this prestigious award. Hansberry completed another play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (produced 1964), and several screenplays, including the film version of A Raisin in the Sun (1961), before her death at age 34.
The literature of civil rights
Declaring that “all art is ultimately social,” Hansberry was one of several African American writers—most prominently Baldwin and Alice Walker—to take an active part in the civil rights movement and to be energized, imaginatively and socially, by the freedom struggles of the late 1950s and the ’60s. The murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager visiting Mississippi in 1955, led Gwendolyn Brooks to compose “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” signaling her gravitation toward a more explicitly socially critical verse as featured in her volume The Bean Eaters (1960). Poets Margaret Esse Danner and Naomi Long Madgett began their careers publishing similar work in the 1950s.
Amiri Baraka
The development of an increasingly black-identified poetry in the 1960s, written deliberately to inspire black pride and to inflame black revolution, is epitomized in the evolution of LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka. Based in New York’s East Village, Jones became known first as a Beat poet whose collection Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) consisted largely of apolitical critiques of 1950s conventionality and materialism. By 1968, however, Jones had renamed himself Amiri Baraka and resettled in Harlem, where he became the fiery literary voice of a new black self-consciousness and social consciousness declaiming its freedom in original, sometimes shocking verse previewed in Baraka’s The Dead Lecturer (1964, first published under the name of LeRoi Jones). In the same year, Baraka’s play Dutchman, which climaxes in the death of an incipient black revolutionary poet at the hands of a white woman on a subway, won the 1964 Obie Award for the best off-Broadway production of the year. Dutchman’s polarized audience, including particularly whites offended by the murderous and manipulative female lead in the play, foreshadowed the effect that most African American writers who sought to emulate Baraka had when the Black Arts movement, which Baraka advocated, came into full flower in the late 1960s.
The Black Arts movement
The assassination of Malcolm X, eloquent exponent of black nationalism, in 1965 in New York and the espousal of “Black Power” by previously integrationist civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) helped to galvanize a generation of young black writers into rethinking the purpose of African American art. Rejecting any notion of the artist that separated him or her from the African American community, the Black Arts movement engaged in cultural nation building by sponsoring poetry readings, founding community theatres, creating literary magazines, and setting up small presses. In 1968 poetry, fiction, essays, and drama from writers associated with the movement appeared in the landmark anthology Black Fire, edited by Baraka and Larry Neal. One of the most versatile leaders of the Black Arts movement, Neal summed up its goals as the promotion of self-determination, solidarity, and nationhood among African Americans.
To Black Arts writers, literature was frankly a means of exhortation, and poetry was the most immediate way to model and articulate the new Black consciousness the movement sought to foster. Baraka’s Black Magic (1969) and It’s Nation Time (1970) typify the stylistic emphases of the poetry of this movement, particularly its preference for street slang, the rhythm of blues, jazz, and gospel music, and a deliberately provocative confrontational rhetoric. Important poets in this mode were Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Etheridge Knight, Haki R. Madhubuti, Carolyn M. Rodgers, and Nikki Giovanni. Among the leading Black Arts playwrights, Baraka was joined by Ed Bullins, whose plays, such as Clara’s Ole Man (produced 1965) and The Fabulous Miss Marie (produced 1971), concentrated on the gritty existence of urban African Americans, earning three Obie Awards. Although fiction was not as important to the Black Arts movement as were poetry and drama, the mythopoeic short stories of Henry Dumas, collected in Ark of Bones, and Other Stories (1970), and the novels of John A. Williams, particularly The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), a roman à clef about a dying black novelist intent on maintaining his political integrity in the face of government persecution, communicate the spirit of the new Black ideals. The “tell it like it is” temper of the 1960s spurred an unprecedented candour about race and placed a premium on authentic self-expression in African American autobiography. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), a collaboration between Malcolm X and journalist-author Alex Haley, provided a standard that Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), George Jackson’s Soledad Brother (1970), and Angela Davis’s Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) sought to emulate.
Reconceptualizing Blackness
Not all African American writers in the 1960s and early ’70s subscribed to the new credo of Blackness, however. While Gwendolyn Brooks switched publishers, from New York’s Harper & Row to Detroit’s Broadside Press, out of sympathy to the new movement, Robert Hayden was repelled by what he called “the chauvinistic and the doctrinaire.” Ishmael Reed, who reserved the right to lampoon any attempts to impose artistic orthodoxy on African American writing, embarked on his iconoclastic career with a series of parodic novels, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), the latter one taking aim at black cultural nationalism. Another 1960s writer more postmodernist than nationalist, Adrienne Kennedy made her avant-garde theatre debut with stunningly innovative, nightmarish one-act plays, most notably Funnyhouse of a Negro (produced 1962) and The Owl Answers (produced 1963), which featured surrealist spectacles of black women caught between African and European heritages. Offering no political solutions to her female characters’ tormented struggles for unity and purpose, Kennedy dramatized the potent psychological and social symbolic value of black American women’s emotions and personal lives. Less openly resistant to the strictures of the Black Arts aesthetic but no less dedicated to faithful and nuanced presentations of a wide range of African American experience, Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson also broke into print during the 1960s, demonstrating a mastery of the short story that yielded for Gaines the much-applauded stories in Bloodline (1968) and for McPherson the equally celebrated collection Hue and Cry (1968). Gaines went on to create in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) one of the most famous female characters in African American fiction, whose first-person narrative testifies to the dauntless progress of the black folk whom she represents from bondage to the civil rights era. Jane Pittman joined Vyry Ware, the indomitable heroine of Margaret Walker’s historical novel Jubilee (1966), in liberating black American women of the South from the stereotypes that had bound them to the “mammy” image while also serving notice to the male- and urban-oriented Black Arts movement that the voices and traditions of black women, Southern black culture, and the rural past offered much to the reconceptualizing of blackness that the 1960s and ’70s had undertaken.
Renaissance in the 1970s
A variety of literary, cultural, and political developments during the 1950s and ’60s, including the heightened visibility of Hansberry, Kennedy, Walker, and Brooks, the expanding presence of black women’s experience and expressive traditions in African American writing, and the impact of the women’s movement on African American women’s consciousness, fostered what has been termed “the black women’s literary renaissance” of the 1970s.
Toni Morrison Although this outpouring of creative energy by African American women, especially in fiction, had a long foreground, its founding text is generally considered The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison. Born in Lorain, Ohio, and educated at Howard University and Cornell University, Morrison, a senior editor at Random House when she started her literary career, focused her first novel on the destructive effect of white ideals of beauty, symbolized in blue eyes, on a lonely black girl’s attempt to find a positive sense of identity in a loveless family and a community prone to scapegoating. The Bluest Eye’s implicit endorsement of the “Black is beautiful” slogan of the 1970s made it topical, but its attention to the psychology of oppression affecting a poor, small-town black girl diverged from the norm of the Black Arts movement, which featured male protagonists in conflict with the larger white society. By 1974 The Bluest Eye was out of print, but in the previous year Morrison had brought out Sula, original for its portrayal of female friendship as the essential relationship in an African American novel and for its creation of the amoral, adventurous, and self-sanctioned Sula Peace, whose radical individualism Morrison traces with nonjudgmental detachment. More popular than The Bluest Eye, Sula whetted the appetite of Morrison’s growing audience for her third major work of the 1970s, Song of Solomon (1977), the first African American novel since Native Son to be a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection. Song of Solomon blends African American folklore, history, and literary tradition to celebrate the moral and spiritual revival of Macon Dead, the first male protagonist in a Morrison novel, via the guidance and example of his aunt Pilate, another of Morrison’s unconventional, soul-liberating heroines. By the end of the decade, Morrison was the leading African American writer of the 1970s, an inspiration to a generation of younger novelists, especially Toni Cade Bambara, whose novel The Salt Eaters (1980) won the American Book Award, and Gloria Naylor, whose novel The Women of Brewster Place (1982) won a National Book Award for best first novel in 1983.
Alice Walker Morrison was not the only black woman to exert a major influence on African American literature in the 1970s and ’80s. Alice Walker punctuated the decade with a series of controversial books: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), an epic novel that tracks three generations of a black Southern family through internal strife and a struggle to rise from sharecropping; Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), a collection of poems that urges its reader to “[b]e nobody’s darling; / Be an outcast”; and Meridian (1976), a novelistic redefinition of African American motherhood. In 1982 Walker’s most famous novel, The Color Purple, an epistolary novel that depicted rape, incest, bisexuality, and lesbian love among African Americans, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The successes of Morrison and Walker helped foster a climate for artistic explorations of race, gender, and class in a wide range of literary forms, such as the novels of Paule Marshall (a novelist previously published but not accepted as a major writer until the appearance of Praisesong for the Widow [1983]), Octavia E. Butler, Gayl Jones, and Jamaica Kincaid; the poetry of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Rita Dove; and the drama of Ntozake Shange. The remarkable sustained popularity of Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), one of the most widely read and taught books by an African American woman, demonstrates the lasting appeal to white as well as black American readers of much contemporary African American women’s writing, especially when it is informed by the upbeat, woman-affirming outlook typified by Angelou’s prose and poetry.
The turn of the 21st century
Although women’s writing claimed centre stage in the eyes of many critics and a large number of readers of African American literature from the 1970s to the end of the 20th century, African American male writers continued to receive important recognition for their work during this time. Seven years after Dove received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Thomas and Beulah (1986), her tribute to her maternal grandparents, Yusef Komunyakaa won the same prize for Neon Vernacular (1993), a collage of new and collected poems from seven previous volumes, ranging from Dien Cai Dau (1988), based on Komunyakaa’s service in Vietnam, to Magic City (1992), a tense and lyrical evocation of the poet’s boyhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana. When Butler, the first important African American woman science fiction writer, won that genre’s prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards for her 1984 short story “Bloodchild,” she retraced the path opened by Samuel R. Delany, who garnered Nebulas for Babel-17 (1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967) and a Hugo for the autobiographical The Motion of Light in Water (1988). The voices of novelist John Wideman (who twice won the PEN/Faulkner Award given by the international writers’ organization Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists [PEN]) and his incarcerated brother Robby in Brothers and Keepers (1984), one of the most innovative African American autobiographies of the late 20th century, previewed the success that awaited later women’s collaborative first-person texts, such as the 1988 American Book Award winner Tight Spaces by Kesho Scott, Cherry Muhanji, and Egyirba High and the best-selling Having Our Say (1993) by centenarian sisters Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany.
In the last decades of the 20th century, African American drama soared into the highest echelon of American theatre, as Charles Gordone won the first Pulitzer Prize for an African American play with his depiction of a black hustler-poet in No Place to Be Somebody (produced 1969), Joseph A. Walker earned a prestigious Tony Award (presented by two American theatre organizations) for the best play of 1973 for the smash Broadway hit The River Niger (produced 1972), and Charles H. Fuller, Jr., claimed a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for A Soldier’s Play (produced 1981), a tragedy set in a segregated military base in Louisiana. In the 1980s and ’90s, George Wolfe won substantial acclaim both as a playwright, whose The Colored Museum (produced 1986) lampooned stereotypes and myths of black culture, and as the director of Angels in America, a Tony Award-winning drama by white playwright Tony Kushner.
August Wilson The most accomplished of all African American dramatists in the last half of the 20th century, August Wilson, a high-school dropout and Black Power activist in the 1960s, opened his first major play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, on Broadway in 1984 with great critical and commercial success. The first of Wilson’s “20th-century cycle,” a series of plays designed to treat African American life in every decade of the past century, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which concerns blues musicians during the 1920s, was followed by Fences (produced 1985), which delineates a father-son conflict in a working-class family of the 1950s; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (produced 1986), about a displaced Southern black man’s quest for his wife in 1911 Pittsburgh; The Piano Lesson (produced 1987), in which competing ideas about their legacy threatens to rupture an African American family in the 1930s; and Two Trains Running (produced 1990), a look at the Black Power ideals of the 1960s from the perspective of the late 1980s. Fences and The Piano Lesson both won the Pulitzer Prize. Wilson’s later plays, Seven Guitars (produced 1995), Jitney! (produced in 1982 and revived in 1996), King Hedley II (produced 1999), and Gem of the Ocean (produced 2003), continued to excite the admiration of critics and viewers alike.
African American rootsThe reclamation of African American history has propelled imaginatively an unusual number of black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet for a feature film about black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada (1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial fugitive slave protagonist on a quest for emancipation that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning ideas about self and race. The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, an African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which an escaped slave mother killed her infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and, with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the “word-work” of black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
William L. Andrews
ARTICLEAdditional ReadingStudies of major periods of African American literature are Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915 (1989), and The Origins of African American Literature, 1680–1865 (2001); Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892 (1993); Blyden Jackson, A History of Afro-American Literature: The Long Beginning, 1746–1895 (1989– ); and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981, reissued 1997).
Studies of major genres and literary traditions in African American literature include William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (1986); Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987); Barbara T. Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (1980); Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, 2nd ed. (1991); and Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes (1973).
Among the major anthologies of African American literature are Henry Louis Gates, Jr., et al. (eds.), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2003); and Patricia Liggins Hill et al. (eds.), Call & Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998).
William L. Andrews
LINKSRelated ArticlesAspects of the topic African American literature are discussed in the following places at Britannica.
Assorted References•major reference (in American literature: African American literature)
Black writers of this period found alternatives to the Richard Wright tradition of angry social protest. James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, both protégés of Wright, wrote polemical essays calling for a literature that reflected the full complexity of black life in the United States. In his first and best novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Baldwin portrayed the...
•research by Gates (in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (American critic and scholar))
...the years that followed he earned a reputation as a “literary archaeologist” by recovering and collecting thousands of lost literary works (short stories, poems, reviews, and notices) by African American authors dating from the early 19th to the mid-20th century. In the early 1980s Gates rediscovered the earliest novel by an African American, Harriet E. Wilson’s Our...
BRITANNICA CLASSIC•article by Du Bois (in Tylenol (drug)
What follows is a brief summary of the unique contribution of African Americans to American literature, written for the 13th edition (1926) of Encyclopædia Britannica. Its author, W.E.B. Du Bois, had played a prominent role in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and at the time this article was written he was the...
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OtherThe following is a selection of items (artistic styles or groups, constructions, events, fictional characters, organizations, publications) associated with "African American literature"
•African American literature
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Supplemental Information
ARTICLESpotlightsEncyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black History
Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to the Nobel Prizes
LINKSExternal Web SitesThe topic African American literature is discussed at the following external Web sites.Snally Gaster’s African American Phat Library
African American Literature Book Club
Informative, easily navigable resource for African-American literature. Offers profiles of African-American authors, virtual poetry readings, book reviews, a comprehensive list of resources for writers, the online purchasing of books, and more.
PBS Online - Literature and Life
ThinkQuest - Biography of W.E.B. DuBois
Academic resource on William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s life and works. Includes biographical articles and information on the scholars influenced by this social scientist. Features conference details and a bibliography.
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MLA Style:
"African American literature." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 19 Oct. 2011..
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African American literature. (2011). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/926640/African-American-literature
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Beginning in the pre-Revolutionary War period, African American writers have engaged in a creative, if often contentious, dialogue with American letters. The result is a literature rich in expressive subtlety and social insight, offering illuminating assessments of American identities and history. Although since 1970 African American writers, led by Toni Morrison, have earned widespread critical acclaim, this literature has been recognized internationally as well as nationally since its inception in the late 18th century.
Antebellum literature
African Americans launched their literature in North America during the second half of the 18th century, joining the war of words between England and its rebellious colonies with a special sense of mission. The earliest African American writers sought to demonstrate that the proposition “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence required that black Americans be extended the same human rights as those claimed by white Americans. Couching a social justice argument in the Christian gospel of the universal brotherhood of humanity, African-born Phillis Wheatley, enslaved in Boston, dedicated her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first African American book, to proving that “Negros, black as Cain,” were not inherently inferior to whites in matters of the spirit and thus could “join th’ angelic train” as spiritual equals to whites. Composing poems in a wide range of classical genres, Wheatley was determined to show by her mastery of form and metre, as well as by her pious and learned subjects, that a black poet was as capable of artistic expression as a white poet. Poems on Various Subjects provided a powerful argument against the proslavery contention that the failure of African peoples to write serious literature was proof of their intellectual inadequacies and their fitness for enslavement. The poetry and sermons of the Connecticut slave Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806?), though their major theme is the urgency of Christian conversion, buttressed the demand of early African American writers for literary recognition.
In 1789 Olaudah Equiano, Wheatley’s most famous black literary contemporary, published his two-volume autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. A British citizen who had experienced enslavement in the Americas, Equiano has been traditionally regarded, along with Wheatley, as the founder of African literature in English by virtue of his having pioneered the slave narrative, a firsthand literary testimony against slavery which, by the early 19th century, earned for African American literature a burgeoning readership in Britain as well as in the United States. One of the most remarkable features of Equiano’s story is his use of African origins to establish his credibility as a critic of European imperialism in Africa. Recent research, however, has raised questions about whether Equiano was born an Igbo (Ibo) in Africa, as he claims in his autobiography. His baptismal record in Westminster, England, lists him on February 9, 1759, as “Gustavus Vassa a Black born in Carolina 12 years old.” Scholars have also debated whether Equiano’s account of Igbo life in his autobiography is based on reading rather than memory. In the absence of scholarly consensus on these controversial matters, The Interesting Narrative remains a pivotal text in portraying Africa as neither morally benighted nor culturally backward but rather as a model of social harmony defiled by Euro-American greed.
In the early 19th century, the standard-bearers of African American literature spoke with heightening urgency of the need for whites to address the terrible sin of slavery. Through essays, poetry, and fiction as well as more conventional journalism, African American newspapers, inaugurated by Freedom’s Journal in 1827, extolled the achievements of black people worldwide while lobbying persistently for an end to slavery. As the prophet of literary black nationalism in the United States, David Walker wrote his incendiary Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) to warn white America of impending racial violence if slavery were not abolished. Echoing Walker, who was a fellow Bostonian, Maria W. Stewart, the first African American woman political writer, issued her Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart in 1835, in which she encouraged black women in the North to take a more outspoken role in civil rights agitation and black community building. A year after the publication of Stewart’s Productions, Jarena Lee, a domestic servant impelled by a call to preach, published The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, the first spiritual autobiography by an African American woman.
Slave narratives In the wake of the bloody Nat Turner rebellion in Southampton county, Virginia, in 1831, an increasingly fervent antislavery movement in the United States sponsored firsthand autobiographical accounts of slavery by fugitives from the South in order to make abolitionists of a largely indifferent white Northern readership. From 1830 to the end of the slavery era, the fugitive slave narrative dominated the literary landscape of antebellum black America. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) gained the most attention, establishing Frederick Douglass as the leading African American man of letters of his time. By predicating his struggle for freedom on his solitary pursuit of literacy, education, and independence, Douglass portrayed himself as a self-made man, which appealed strongly to middle-class white Americans. In his second, revised autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass depicted himself as a product of a slave community in Maryland’s Eastern Shore and explained how his struggles for independence and liberty did not end when he reached the so-called “free states” of the North. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, candidly describes her experience of the sexual exploitation that made slavery especially oppressive for black women. Chronicling what she called “the war” of her life, which ultimately won both her own freedom and that of her two children, Jacobs proved the inadequacy of the image of victim that had been applied pervasively to female slaves. Her work and the antislavery and feminist oratory of the New York ex-slave who renamed herself Sojourner Truth enriched early African American literature with unprecedented models of female eloquence and heroism.
Prose, drama, and poetryThrough the slave narrative, African Americans entered the world of prose and dramatic literature. In 1853 William Wells Brown, an internationally known fugitive slave narrator, authored the first black American novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter. It tells the tragic story of the beautiful light-skinned African American daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress; Clotel dies trying to save her own daughter from slavery. Five years later Brown also published the first African American play, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, based on scenes and themes familiar to readers of fugitive slave narratives. In the late 1850s Martin R. Delany, a black journalist and physician who would later serve as a major in the Union army during the Civil War, wrote Blake; or, The Huts of America (serially published in 1859), a novel whose hero plots a slave revolt in the South. In 1859 the first African American women’s fiction appeared: “The Two Offers,” a short story by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper dealing with middle-class women whose race is not specified, and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, an autobiographical novel about the life of a working-class black woman in the North. The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002), an apparently fictionalized slave narrative discovered in manuscript in the early 21st century, also may be among the earliest contributions to African American women’s fiction, but the identity of its author, Hannah Crafts, has yet to be confirmed. Harper, by contrast, was renowned in mid-19th-century black America as the poetic voice of her people, a writer whose verse was direct, impassioned, and poignant. She and James M. Whitfield, author of a volume of spirited protest poetry entitled America and Other Poems (1853), helped ensure that the 1850s would become the first African American literary renaissance.
Oral tradition Behind the achievements of individual African American writers during the antislavery era lies the communal consciousness of millions of slaves, whose oral tradition in song and story has given form and substance to much subsequent literature by black Americans. Douglass recalled that the plantation spiritual “Run to Jesus” had first suggested to him the thought of making his escape from slavery. When slaves sang “I thank God I’m free at last,” only they knew whether they were referring to freedom from sin or from slavery. A second great fund of Southern black folklore, the beast fables that originated in Africa testified to the slaves’ commonsense understanding of human psychology and everyday justice. The slaves selected for special celebration trickster figures, most notably Brer Rabbit, because of their facility in combating stronger antagonists through wit, guile, and the skillful adoption of deceptive masks.
The Civil War and Reconstruction
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their voices to convince President Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war to end slavery, which black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight. This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 black soldiers joining the Union army. Charlotte Forten, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most black Americans when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from slavery in St. Louis to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent ex-slave in the person of Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-conscious black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century. Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular American literature, which middle-class black writers often imitated, to a real-world sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that highlighted the centrality of educated black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among black readers with two book-length epic poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in Spenserian stanzas.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
On August 25, 1893, Whitman shared the platform for African American literature at the Chicago World’s Fair with a 21-year-old Ohioan named Paul Laurence Dunbar, who had just that year published his first volume of poetry, Oak and Ivy. Though not the first black American to write poetry in so-called Negro dialect, Dunbar was by far the most successful, both critically and financially. Deeply ambivalent about his white readers’ preference for what he called “a jingle in a broken tongue,” Dunbar wrote a great deal of verse in standard diction and form, including a handful of lyrics, such as “We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy,” and “The Haunted Oak,” that testify candidly and movingly to his frustrated aspirations as a black poet in a white supremacist era. The first professional African American writer, Dunbar also authored a large body of fiction, including four novels, the most important of which—The Sport of the Gods (1901)—offered a bleak view of African American prospects in urban America that anticipated the work of Richard Wright.
The novel as social analysis
While most of Dunbar’s fiction was designed primarily to entertain his white readers, in the hands of Harper, Sutton E. Griggs, and Charles W. Chesnutt, the novel became an instrument of social analysis and direct confrontation with the prejudices, stereotypes, and racial mythologies that allowed whites to ignore worsening social conditions for blacks in the last decades of the 19th century. Harper’s Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) attempted to counter specious notions of slavery popularized by white writers who idealized plantation life, while offering models of socially committed middle-class African Americans who exemplify the ideals of uplift that motivated much of Harper’s writing. Griggs, a Baptist minister who wrote five novels and founded a publishing company, excoriated racism in his fiction, stressing the need for his educated middle-class heroes and heroines to turn away from whiteness as a standard of value and rely instead on self-determination and racial solidarity. Unlike Harper and Griggs, whose fiction won few readers outside black communities, Chesnutt attracted the backing of prestigious publishing houses in Boston and New York. Between 1899 and 1905 he published two books of short stories and three novels of purpose that addressed the causes and consequences of racial problems in the postwar South. Based on the Wilmington, North Carolina, racial massacre of 1898, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) was reviewed extensively throughout the United States as a timely study of troubling contemporary issues, but its commercial success was limited, probably because of its unsparing assessment of white supremacy.
Booket T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois
As segregation regimes took hold in the South in the 1890s with the tacit approval of the rest of the country, many African Americans found a champion in Booker T. Washington and adopted his self-help autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), as their guidebook to improved fortunes. Washington portrayed his own life in such a way as to suggest that even the most disadvantaged of black people could attain dignity and prosperity in the South by proving themselves valuable, productive members of society deserving of fair and equal treatment before the law. A classic American success story, Up from Slavery solidified Washington’s reputation as the most eminent African American of the new century. Yet Washington’s primacy was soon challenged. In his landmark collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a professor of sociology at Atlanta University, disputed the main principle of Washington’s political program, the idea that voting and civil rights were less important to black progress than acquiring property and achieving economic self-sufficiency. Unlike Washington, who foresaw the steady obliteration of racial prejudice and discrimination, Du Bois prophesied in the opening lines of The Souls of Black Folk: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” An uncompromising advocate of civil and voting rights, Du Bois asserted in The Souls of Black Folk that through “work, culture, and liberty” the dual heritage of African Americans—what he called “double-consciousness”—could be melded into a force for positive social and cultural change in the United States. Du Bois’s striving to dramatize in his narrator a synthesis of racial and national consciousness dedicated to “the ideal of human brotherhood” made The Souls of Black Folk one of the most provocative and influential works of African American literature in the 20th century.
The rise of the New Negro
During the first two decades of the 20th century, rampant racial injustices, led by weekly reports of grisly lynchings, gave strong impetus to protest writing. From the editor’s desk of the Colored American Magazine, Pauline E. Hopkins wrote novels, short stories, editorials, and social commentary in the early 1900s that attempted to revive the fervour of the antislavery era. The founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 in New York City put Du Bois in charge of its organ, The Crisis, which, as its editor from 1910 to 1934, he fashioned into the most widely read African American magazine of its time. In 1912 future NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson, poet, diplomat, and journalist, published anonymously The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a psychological novel that employed the theme of passing for white to explore the double consciousness of its protagonist with a dispassionate objectivity unattempted in African American fiction up to that time. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, Harlem was well on its way to becoming what Johnson called “the greatest Negro city in the world,” attracting key intellectual leaders and artists such as Du Bois and Johnson, not to mention thousands of migrants from the South and Midwest whose talents and aspirations would fuel in the 1920s the second great renaissance of African American culture.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an anthology edited by Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to black writing on the part of major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favour and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few, until well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry. Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and file of black America and proudly identified themselves as black poets, Cullen sought success through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to the folk sermon tradition of Southern blacks.
NovelistsMcKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade. Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and colour prejudice among black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929) exposes colour prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality. The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the black female protagonists of her novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern black community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
Playwrights and editors
Although the most memorable literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance was in narrative prose and poetry, the movement also inspired dramatists such as Willis Richardson, whose The Chip Woman’s Fortune (produced 1923) was the first nonmusical play by an African American to be produced on Broadway. African American editors such as Charles S. Johnson, whose monthly Opportunity was launched in 1923 under the auspices of the National Urban League, and the respected Caribbean-born short-story writer Eric Walrond, who published young black writers in Negro World, the organ of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, provided significant visibility for New Negro writers. Anthologies, particularly of poetry, abounded during the Harlem Renaissance, enhancing the literary reputations of both the writers represented in them and their editors. The editors included James Weldon Johnson (The Book of American Negro Poetry [1922] and The Book of American Negro Spirituals [1925, 1926]), Charles S. Johnson (Ebony and Topaz [1927]), and Cullen (Caroling Dusk [1927]), to mention only a handful of the most noteworthy.
The advent of urban realism
Despite the enormous outpouring of creativity during the 1920s, the vogue of black writing, black art, and black culture waned markedly in the early 1930s as the Great Depression took hold in the United States. African American pundits in the 1930s and ’40s tended to depreciate the achievements of the New Negroes, calling instead for a more politically engaged, socially critical realism in literature.
Richard Wright The chief proponent of this position was Richard Wright, whose fiction, autobiography, and social commentary dominated African American literature from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. A migrant from Mississippi with barely a ninth-grade education, Wright set the tone for the post-New Negro era with Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), a collection of novellas set in the Jim Crow South that evidenced Wright’s strong affinity with Marxism and the influence of American Naturalist writers such as Theodore Dreiser. In 1940 Wright’s monumental novel Native Son appeared, winning thunderous critical acclaim as well as unprecedented financial success. Charting the violent life and death of a Chicago ghetto youth, Native Son revived the protest tradition of 19th-century African American literature while eschewing its moralizing, sentimentality, and political conservatism. Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945) also revisited a 19th-century tradition, the slave narrative, to chronicle his quest, as much intellectual as physical, from an oppressive South to anticipated freedom in Chicago. After the critical and popular success of Black Boy in the mid-1940s, Wright moved to Paris, where he continued to publish fiction and travel books, though none matched the achievement of his work in the 1940s. Nevertheless, the stamp Wright placed on African American prose remained evident in the work of novelists such as William Attaway, Chester Himes, and Ann Petry, which has often been interpreted as belonging to “the Wright school” of social realism. Petry’s The Street (1946) adopted Wright’s pitiless assessment of the power of environment in the lives of black urban dwellers, but, unlike Wright, whose female characters generally exemplify demoralization and passivity, Petry created a female protagonist who fights back.
Chicago writers
The Chicago Defender, one of the premier African American newspapers of the 20th century, portrayed the Windy City as a cultural and economic mecca for black migrants fleeing the South during the Great Depression. Wright, who moved from Memphis, Tennessee, to Chicago in 1927, found in the South Side of Chicago a lively community of young African American writers, among them poet Margaret Walker, playwright Theodore Ward, poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis, and novelist and children’s book author Arna Bontemps. Chicago-based Abbott’s Monthly (1930–33), established by the Defender’s editor, Robert Abbott, published the work of Wright and Himes for the first time, while New Challenge (1937), coedited by novelist Dorothy West and Wright, helped the fledgling Chicago black literary renaissance expound its purpose. In the 1940s Negro Digest and Negro Story, also literary products of Chicago’s South Side, provided outlets for fiction writers, poets, and essayists. Encouraged by the Chicago and New York units of the Federal Theater Project, African American drama advanced during the Depression, led by Abram Hill, founder of the American Negro Theater in Harlem; Hughes, whose play Mulatto (produced 1935) reached Broadway with a searching examination of miscegenation; and Ward, whose Big White Fog (produced 1938) was the most widely viewed African American drama of the period.
The 1940s
During the 1930s and ’40s Hughes and Sterling A. Brown kept the folk spirit alive in African American poetry. An admirer of Hughes, Margaret Walker dedicated For My People (1942), the title poem of which remains one of the most popular texts for recitation and performance in African American literature, to the same black American rank and file whom Hughes and Brown celebrated. By the early 1940s three figures, Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, and Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks, were showing how the vernacular tradition could be adapted to modernist experimentation. The variety of expressiveness and formal innovation in African American poetry of the 1940s is reflected in Tolson’s densely allusive Rendezvous with America (1942), Hayden’s meditative history poems such as “Middle Passage” (1945) and “Frederick Douglass” (1947), and Brooks’s tribute to the vitality and rigours of black urban life in A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and her Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Annie Allen (1949). The 1940s was also a decade of creative experimentation in autobiography, led by Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn (1940), a self-styled “essay toward an autobiography of a race concept”; Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), an early venture in “autoethnography,” the writing of self via the characterization of a culture (in this case, the rural Southern black culture of Hurston’s roots); J. Saunders Redding’s No Day of Triumph (1942), the story of an alienated Northern professional’s quest for redemptive immersion in Southern black working-class communities; and Wright’s Black Boy.
Ralph Ellison In 1949 the young New York essayist James Baldwin, a protégé of Wright, published “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” a criticism of protest fiction from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Native Son. Baldwin’s charge that the protest novel was prone to categorize humanity rather than reflect its full “beauty, dread, and power” heralded a shift in the 1950s away from Wright’s brand of realism. The most enduring African American novel of the 1950s, Invisible Man (1952), by another Wright protégé, Ralph Ellison, answered Baldwin’s call for “a new act of creation,” a new kind of black hero, and a new way of picturing that hero’s participation in post-Depression, post-World War II American reality. The protagonist of Ellison’s novel is an unnamed black everyman who makes the traditional journey in African American literature from the South to the North, where he goes in search of conventional success and ends up, through a series of ironic revelations, discovering himself. The Invisible Man has been called a modern Odysseus and a 20th-century Candide, in tribute to Ellison’s ability to invest in his central character a universality that bespeaks its author’s wide reading in Western myth and European, British, and American literature. But foremost the Invisible Man is a black American engaged, willy-nilly, in an often painful process of education. Part Douglass, part Washington, and part Du Bois, he struggles with the dominant “isms,” from Freudianism to Marxism, of the first half of the 20th century to decide what black intellectual leadership can and should be in the second half of the century. Encountering a volatile American reality that defies every political or philosophical attempt to define and control it, the Invisible Man comes to realize that his African American folk and cultural heritage, embodied in a series of black antagonists and enigmatic mentors, represents some of the most valuable wisdom he needs in order to discover his role and responsibilities in modern America. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953, reflecting the enormously positive critical reception the novel enjoyed. Ellison never published another novel during his lifetime, but his essays, reviews, and interviews, published as Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), acknowledged his unwavering commitment to a pluralistic ideal of art that knows no allegiance to any school or program.
James Baldwin
In 1953 Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, testified anew to the sophisticated formal experimentation and piercing examination of African American consciousness of which the writers coming of age in the 1950s were capable. The story of religious conversion experienced by 14-year-old John Grimes of Harlem, Go Tell It on the Mountain places in creative tension its hero’s spiritual awakening and his determination to gain his independence from his oppressive stepfather. The result is a novel of unprecedented honesty in its revelation of generational and gender conflicts between its central characters, who constitute an African American family haunted by self-hatred, guilt, the psychological scars of racism, unsanctioned sexual desire, and a hunger for deliverance. Two years after Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin collected his essays in Notes of a Native Son, a mix of autobiography and political commentary on race in America that identified Baldwin as the new conscience of the nation on racial matters. Subsequent volumes of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963), underlined Baldwin’s fame as the most incisive and passionate essayist ever produced by black America. His novels of the 1950s and ’60s—particularly Giovanni’s Room (1956), the first African American novel to treat homosexuality openly, and Another Country (1962), a best-seller that examined bisexuality, interracial sex, and the many prejudices that enforced hierarchies of difference in American society—confirmed Baldwin’s leadership among those black American writers at mid century who wanted to move fiction toward a renewed search for personal meaning and redemption while challenging the white American consensus that viewed triumph in World War II as a vindication of the American way on the racial home front.
African American theater
During the decade following World War II, professional African American dramatists—such as William Blackwell Branch, author of In Splendid Error (produced 1954); Alice Childress, creator of the Obie Award-winning Trouble in Mind (produced 1955); and Loften Mitchell, best known for A Land Beyond the River (produced 1957)—found greater access to the white American theatre than any previous generation of black playwrights had known. Baldwin began a dramatic career in 1955 with The Amen Corner, which focuses on a female preacher in a Harlem storefront church. Hughes continued his stage presence with his musical comedy Simply Heavenly in 1957.
But no one in African American theatre could have predicted the huge critical and popular success that came to Chicagoan Lorraine Hansberry after her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in March 1959. A searching portrayal of an African American family confronting the problems of upward mobility and integration, A Raisin in the Sun introduced not only the most brilliant playwright yet produced by black America but also an extraordinarily talented cast of African (or Bahamian, in the case of Sidney Poitier) American actors, including Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Lou Gossett, Jr., and the play’s director, Lloyd Richards, the first black director of a Broadway show in more than 50 years. Hansberry’s play was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959; she was the first African American writer to win this prestigious award. Hansberry completed another play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (produced 1964), and several screenplays, including the film version of A Raisin in the Sun (1961), before her death at age 34.
The literature of civil rights
Declaring that “all art is ultimately social,” Hansberry was one of several African American writers—most prominently Baldwin and Alice Walker—to take an active part in the civil rights movement and to be energized, imaginatively and socially, by the freedom struggles of the late 1950s and the ’60s. The murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager visiting Mississippi in 1955, led Gwendolyn Brooks to compose “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” signaling her gravitation toward a more explicitly socially critical verse as featured in her volume The Bean Eaters (1960). Poets Margaret Esse Danner and Naomi Long Madgett began their careers publishing similar work in the 1950s.
Amiri Baraka
The development of an increasingly black-identified poetry in the 1960s, written deliberately to inspire black pride and to inflame black revolution, is epitomized in the evolution of LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka. Based in New York’s East Village, Jones became known first as a Beat poet whose collection Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) consisted largely of apolitical critiques of 1950s conventionality and materialism. By 1968, however, Jones had renamed himself Amiri Baraka and resettled in Harlem, where he became the fiery literary voice of a new black self-consciousness and social consciousness declaiming its freedom in original, sometimes shocking verse previewed in Baraka’s The Dead Lecturer (1964, first published under the name of LeRoi Jones). In the same year, Baraka’s play Dutchman, which climaxes in the death of an incipient black revolutionary poet at the hands of a white woman on a subway, won the 1964 Obie Award for the best off-Broadway production of the year. Dutchman’s polarized audience, including particularly whites offended by the murderous and manipulative female lead in the play, foreshadowed the effect that most African American writers who sought to emulate Baraka had when the Black Arts movement, which Baraka advocated, came into full flower in the late 1960s.
The Black Arts movement
The assassination of Malcolm X, eloquent exponent of black nationalism, in 1965 in New York and the espousal of “Black Power” by previously integrationist civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) helped to galvanize a generation of young black writers into rethinking the purpose of African American art. Rejecting any notion of the artist that separated him or her from the African American community, the Black Arts movement engaged in cultural nation building by sponsoring poetry readings, founding community theatres, creating literary magazines, and setting up small presses. In 1968 poetry, fiction, essays, and drama from writers associated with the movement appeared in the landmark anthology Black Fire, edited by Baraka and Larry Neal. One of the most versatile leaders of the Black Arts movement, Neal summed up its goals as the promotion of self-determination, solidarity, and nationhood among African Americans.
To Black Arts writers, literature was frankly a means of exhortation, and poetry was the most immediate way to model and articulate the new Black consciousness the movement sought to foster. Baraka’s Black Magic (1969) and It’s Nation Time (1970) typify the stylistic emphases of the poetry of this movement, particularly its preference for street slang, the rhythm of blues, jazz, and gospel music, and a deliberately provocative confrontational rhetoric. Important poets in this mode were Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Etheridge Knight, Haki R. Madhubuti, Carolyn M. Rodgers, and Nikki Giovanni. Among the leading Black Arts playwrights, Baraka was joined by Ed Bullins, whose plays, such as Clara’s Ole Man (produced 1965) and The Fabulous Miss Marie (produced 1971), concentrated on the gritty existence of urban African Americans, earning three Obie Awards. Although fiction was not as important to the Black Arts movement as were poetry and drama, the mythopoeic short stories of Henry Dumas, collected in Ark of Bones, and Other Stories (1970), and the novels of John A. Williams, particularly The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), a roman à clef about a dying black novelist intent on maintaining his political integrity in the face of government persecution, communicate the spirit of the new Black ideals. The “tell it like it is” temper of the 1960s spurred an unprecedented candour about race and placed a premium on authentic self-expression in African American autobiography. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), a collaboration between Malcolm X and journalist-author Alex Haley, provided a standard that Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), George Jackson’s Soledad Brother (1970), and Angela Davis’s Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) sought to emulate.
Reconceptualizing Blackness
Not all African American writers in the 1960s and early ’70s subscribed to the new credo of Blackness, however. While Gwendolyn Brooks switched publishers, from New York’s Harper & Row to Detroit’s Broadside Press, out of sympathy to the new movement, Robert Hayden was repelled by what he called “the chauvinistic and the doctrinaire.” Ishmael Reed, who reserved the right to lampoon any attempts to impose artistic orthodoxy on African American writing, embarked on his iconoclastic career with a series of parodic novels, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), the latter one taking aim at black cultural nationalism. Another 1960s writer more postmodernist than nationalist, Adrienne Kennedy made her avant-garde theatre debut with stunningly innovative, nightmarish one-act plays, most notably Funnyhouse of a Negro (produced 1962) and The Owl Answers (produced 1963), which featured surrealist spectacles of black women caught between African and European heritages. Offering no political solutions to her female characters’ tormented struggles for unity and purpose, Kennedy dramatized the potent psychological and social symbolic value of black American women’s emotions and personal lives. Less openly resistant to the strictures of the Black Arts aesthetic but no less dedicated to faithful and nuanced presentations of a wide range of African American experience, Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson also broke into print during the 1960s, demonstrating a mastery of the short story that yielded for Gaines the much-applauded stories in Bloodline (1968) and for McPherson the equally celebrated collection Hue and Cry (1968). Gaines went on to create in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) one of the most famous female characters in African American fiction, whose first-person narrative testifies to the dauntless progress of the black folk whom she represents from bondage to the civil rights era. Jane Pittman joined Vyry Ware, the indomitable heroine of Margaret Walker’s historical novel Jubilee (1966), in liberating black American women of the South from the stereotypes that had bound them to the “mammy” image while also serving notice to the male- and urban-oriented Black Arts movement that the voices and traditions of black women, Southern black culture, and the rural past offered much to the reconceptualizing of blackness that the 1960s and ’70s had undertaken.
Renaissance in the 1970s
A variety of literary, cultural, and political developments during the 1950s and ’60s, including the heightened visibility of Hansberry, Kennedy, Walker, and Brooks, the expanding presence of black women’s experience and expressive traditions in African American writing, and the impact of the women’s movement on African American women’s consciousness, fostered what has been termed “the black women’s literary renaissance” of the 1970s.
Toni Morrison Although this outpouring of creative energy by African American women, especially in fiction, had a long foreground, its founding text is generally considered The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison. Born in Lorain, Ohio, and educated at Howard University and Cornell University, Morrison, a senior editor at Random House when she started her literary career, focused her first novel on the destructive effect of white ideals of beauty, symbolized in blue eyes, on a lonely black girl’s attempt to find a positive sense of identity in a loveless family and a community prone to scapegoating. The Bluest Eye’s implicit endorsement of the “Black is beautiful” slogan of the 1970s made it topical, but its attention to the psychology of oppression affecting a poor, small-town black girl diverged from the norm of the Black Arts movement, which featured male protagonists in conflict with the larger white society. By 1974 The Bluest Eye was out of print, but in the previous year Morrison had brought out Sula, original for its portrayal of female friendship as the essential relationship in an African American novel and for its creation of the amoral, adventurous, and self-sanctioned Sula Peace, whose radical individualism Morrison traces with nonjudgmental detachment. More popular than The Bluest Eye, Sula whetted the appetite of Morrison’s growing audience for her third major work of the 1970s, Song of Solomon (1977), the first African American novel since Native Son to be a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection. Song of Solomon blends African American folklore, history, and literary tradition to celebrate the moral and spiritual revival of Macon Dead, the first male protagonist in a Morrison novel, via the guidance and example of his aunt Pilate, another of Morrison’s unconventional, soul-liberating heroines. By the end of the decade, Morrison was the leading African American writer of the 1970s, an inspiration to a generation of younger novelists, especially Toni Cade Bambara, whose novel The Salt Eaters (1980) won the American Book Award, and Gloria Naylor, whose novel The Women of Brewster Place (1982) won a National Book Award for best first novel in 1983.
Alice Walker Morrison was not the only black woman to exert a major influence on African American literature in the 1970s and ’80s. Alice Walker punctuated the decade with a series of controversial books: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), an epic novel that tracks three generations of a black Southern family through internal strife and a struggle to rise from sharecropping; Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), a collection of poems that urges its reader to “[b]e nobody’s darling; / Be an outcast”; and Meridian (1976), a novelistic redefinition of African American motherhood. In 1982 Walker’s most famous novel, The Color Purple, an epistolary novel that depicted rape, incest, bisexuality, and lesbian love among African Americans, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The successes of Morrison and Walker helped foster a climate for artistic explorations of race, gender, and class in a wide range of literary forms, such as the novels of Paule Marshall (a novelist previously published but not accepted as a major writer until the appearance of Praisesong for the Widow [1983]), Octavia E. Butler, Gayl Jones, and Jamaica Kincaid; the poetry of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Rita Dove; and the drama of Ntozake Shange. The remarkable sustained popularity of Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), one of the most widely read and taught books by an African American woman, demonstrates the lasting appeal to white as well as black American readers of much contemporary African American women’s writing, especially when it is informed by the upbeat, woman-affirming outlook typified by Angelou’s prose and poetry.
The turn of the 21st century
Although women’s writing claimed centre stage in the eyes of many critics and a large number of readers of African American literature from the 1970s to the end of the 20th century, African American male writers continued to receive important recognition for their work during this time. Seven years after Dove received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Thomas and Beulah (1986), her tribute to her maternal grandparents, Yusef Komunyakaa won the same prize for Neon Vernacular (1993), a collage of new and collected poems from seven previous volumes, ranging from Dien Cai Dau (1988), based on Komunyakaa’s service in Vietnam, to Magic City (1992), a tense and lyrical evocation of the poet’s boyhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana. When Butler, the first important African American woman science fiction writer, won that genre’s prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards for her 1984 short story “Bloodchild,” she retraced the path opened by Samuel R. Delany, who garnered Nebulas for Babel-17 (1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967) and a Hugo for the autobiographical The Motion of Light in Water (1988). The voices of novelist John Wideman (who twice won the PEN/Faulkner Award given by the international writers’ organization Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists [PEN]) and his incarcerated brother Robby in Brothers and Keepers (1984), one of the most innovative African American autobiographies of the late 20th century, previewed the success that awaited later women’s collaborative first-person texts, such as the 1988 American Book Award winner Tight Spaces by Kesho Scott, Cherry Muhanji, and Egyirba High and the best-selling Having Our Say (1993) by centenarian sisters Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany.
In the last decades of the 20th century, African American drama soared into the highest echelon of American theatre, as Charles Gordone won the first Pulitzer Prize for an African American play with his depiction of a black hustler-poet in No Place to Be Somebody (produced 1969), Joseph A. Walker earned a prestigious Tony Award (presented by two American theatre organizations) for the best play of 1973 for the smash Broadway hit The River Niger (produced 1972), and Charles H. Fuller, Jr., claimed a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for A Soldier’s Play (produced 1981), a tragedy set in a segregated military base in Louisiana. In the 1980s and ’90s, George Wolfe won substantial acclaim both as a playwright, whose The Colored Museum (produced 1986) lampooned stereotypes and myths of black culture, and as the director of Angels in America, a Tony Award-winning drama by white playwright Tony Kushner.
August Wilson The most accomplished of all African American dramatists in the last half of the 20th century, August Wilson, a high-school dropout and Black Power activist in the 1960s, opened his first major play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, on Broadway in 1984 with great critical and commercial success. The first of Wilson’s “20th-century cycle,” a series of plays designed to treat African American life in every decade of the past century, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which concerns blues musicians during the 1920s, was followed by Fences (produced 1985), which delineates a father-son conflict in a working-class family of the 1950s; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (produced 1986), about a displaced Southern black man’s quest for his wife in 1911 Pittsburgh; The Piano Lesson (produced 1987), in which competing ideas about their legacy threatens to rupture an African American family in the 1930s; and Two Trains Running (produced 1990), a look at the Black Power ideals of the 1960s from the perspective of the late 1980s. Fences and The Piano Lesson both won the Pulitzer Prize. Wilson’s later plays, Seven Guitars (produced 1995), Jitney! (produced in 1982 and revived in 1996), King Hedley II (produced 1999), and Gem of the Ocean (produced 2003), continued to excite the admiration of critics and viewers alike.
African American rootsThe reclamation of African American history has propelled imaginatively an unusual number of black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet for a feature film about black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada (1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial fugitive slave protagonist on a quest for emancipation that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning ideas about self and race. The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, an African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which an escaped slave mother killed her infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and, with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the “word-work” of black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
William L. Andrews
ARTICLEAdditional ReadingStudies of major periods of African American literature are Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915 (1989), and The Origins of African American Literature, 1680–1865 (2001); Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892 (1993); Blyden Jackson, A History of Afro-American Literature: The Long Beginning, 1746–1895 (1989– ); and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981, reissued 1997).
Studies of major genres and literary traditions in African American literature include William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (1986); Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987); Barbara T. Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (1980); Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, 2nd ed. (1991); and Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes (1973).
Among the major anthologies of African American literature are Henry Louis Gates, Jr., et al. (eds.), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2003); and Patricia Liggins Hill et al. (eds.), Call & Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998).
William L. Andrews
LINKSRelated ArticlesAspects of the topic African American literature are discussed in the following places at Britannica.
Assorted References•major reference (in American literature: African American literature)
Black writers of this period found alternatives to the Richard Wright tradition of angry social protest. James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, both protégés of Wright, wrote polemical essays calling for a literature that reflected the full complexity of black life in the United States. In his first and best novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Baldwin portrayed the...
•research by Gates (in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (American critic and scholar))
...the years that followed he earned a reputation as a “literary archaeologist” by recovering and collecting thousands of lost literary works (short stories, poems, reviews, and notices) by African American authors dating from the early 19th to the mid-20th century. In the early 1980s Gates rediscovered the earliest novel by an African American, Harriet E. Wilson’s Our...
BRITANNICA CLASSIC•article by Du Bois (in Tylenol (drug)
What follows is a brief summary of the unique contribution of African Americans to American literature, written for the 13th edition (1926) of Encyclopædia Britannica. Its author, W.E.B. Du Bois, had played a prominent role in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and at the time this article was written he was the...
)
OtherThe following is a selection of items (artistic styles or groups, constructions, events, fictional characters, organizations, publications) associated with "African American literature"
•African American literature
•literature
Supplemental Information
ARTICLESpotlightsEncyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black History
Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to the Nobel Prizes
LINKSExternal Web SitesThe topic African American literature is discussed at the following external Web sites.Snally Gaster’s African American Phat Library
African American Literature Book Club
Informative, easily navigable resource for African-American literature. Offers profiles of African-American authors, virtual poetry readings, book reviews, a comprehensive list of resources for writers, the online purchasing of books, and more.
PBS Online - Literature and Life
ThinkQuest - Biography of W.E.B. DuBois
Academic resource on William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s life and works. Includes biographical articles and information on the scholars influenced by this social scientist. Features conference details and a bibliography.
Citations
MLA Style:
"African American literature." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 19 Oct. 2011.
APA Style:
African American literature. (2011). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/926640/African-American-literature
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REFERENCED INRELATED TOEBOOKS, PRIMARY SOURCES & MAGAZINESAssorted Referencesmajor reference (in American literature: African American literature) research by Gates (in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (American critic and scholar)) BRITANNICA CLASSICarticle by Du Bois (in Tylenol (drug))OtherThe following is a selection of items (artistic styles or groups, constructions, events, fictional characters, organizations, publications) associated with "African American literature"African American literature literature Quick FactsThe following are quick facts associated with "African American literature"Facts about African American literature: article by Du Bois, as discussed in Negro literature: Facts about African American literature: major reference, as discussed in American literature: African American literature: Facts about African American literature: research by Gates, as discussed in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (American critic and scholar): No Additional Content
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