Classic African American Fiction

Can't get enough of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird? Wondering if you missed something important in one of the chapters? Dive a little deeper into her world, discover hidden treasures, and hang out with Jem and Scout just a little longer with this sidekick.

Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. Amidst the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams, too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. And the 'scraps of baffled hate'—a certain word from a saleswoman, that visit to the cinema, the cruelty of a department store Santa Claus—are always there.

Claude McKay’s first novel, Home to Harlem, was published in 1928 during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay portrays Harlem post-WWI through two Black migrants to New York: Jake, a Southern-born African American longshoreman who deserts the U.S. army and returns to his home in Harlem; and Ray, an educated Haitian immigrant. With his innovative use of Black dialects, McKay portrays a complex world of Black people, both native-born and immigrant, who navigate a dynamic society in the midst of radical change.

First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer's impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets.

Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor. While stowing away on a transatlantic freighter, Lafala is discovered and locked in a frigid closet. Badly frostbitten by the time the boat docks, the once-nimble dancer loses both of his lower legs, emerging from life-saving surgery as what he terms "an amputated man." Thanks to an improbably successful lawsuit against the shipping line, however, Lafala scores big in the litigious United States.

This recently rediscovered and critically acclaimed 1937 novel tells the story of Janie Crawford, a long-legged, articulate, and fiercely independent African-American woman of the 1930s. Janie's quest for identity includes three marriages and a return to her roots. Despite her struggles, Janie never defines herself by regret, fear, or unrealistic dreams, and refuses to be anything but her own person.

In New York City, Joanna Marshall is an aspiring singer obsessed with success, determined to overcome the racism and sexism that stand in her way. Her childhood friends Maggie Ellersley and Peter Bye confront similar barriers but with different goals in mind: Maggie is focused on finding love; Peter, on becoming a surgeon. But as their interests overlap and their ambitions collide, the course of Joanna and Maggie’s lives seems destined to change forever. Written in response to the dominant stereotypes of the time, There Is Confusion paints a revelatory portrait....

Link Williams is a handsome and brilliant Dartmouth graduate who tends bar due to the lack of better opportunities for an African-American man in a staid mid-century Connecticut town. The routine of Link’s life is interrupted when he intervenes to save a woman from a late-night attack. Drinking in a bar together after the incident, “Camilo” discovers that her rescuer is African American and he learns that she is white. Unbeknownst to him, “Camilo” is a wealthy married woman who has crossed the town’s racial divide to relieve the tedium of her life.

Warum hat Rufus Scott - ein begnadeter schwarzer Schlagzeuger aus Harlem - sich das Leben genommen? Wegen seiner Amour fou mit der weißen Leona, einer Liebe, die nicht sein durfte? Verzweifelt sucht Rufus' Schwester Ida nach einer Erklärung. Aber sie findet nur Wahrheiten, die neue Wunden schlagen - auch Wahrheiten über sich selbst. Wie ihr Bruder war Ida lange bereit, sich selbst zu verleugnen, um ihren Traum zu verwirklichen, den Traum, Sängerin zu werden. Wie ihr Bruder trägt sie eine Wut auf die Weißen in sich, die sie diskriminieren. Bis jetzt.

Johnson transformed memories of the sermons he heard in the late 1800s by renowned African American preachers into this now-classic work of original poetry. Basis for a PBS documentary on Johnson titled Lift Every Voice and Sing.

Set in post-World War II Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks, a young, harmonica-blowing blues singer who is always writing music in his head. Torn between his friendships with fellow musicians and nightclub life and his responsibilities to his wife and child, along with the pressures of dealing with a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, siblings Rena and John Walden seek a better life for themselves by passing as white in their new home state of South Carolina. John’s success as an attorney and marriage to a white Southerner help cement his own place, but Rena’s engagement to John’s best friend brings a new level of scrutiny that threatens to expose them both. As the rewards increase, so does the risk, and ultimately, the color line seems determined to re-exert itself.

Northern-educated physician Kenneth Harper moves back to his hometown in Georgia with a relatively modest goal: he wants to start his own medical practice. He hopes that racist prejudices have relaxed enough to allow room for someone like him, but the local presence of the Ku Klux Klan offers some sense of how little the community has actually changed. In response to that reality, Harper seeks to liberate local sharecroppers from white landowners via a cooperative society - but that’s something the area’s ruling class simply cannot abide.

When the free-spirited Zora and the ambitious Bles first meet, they strike up an immediate friendship - one that seems destined to mature into love. That emotional journey is disrupted, however, by the crushingly oppressive forces that surround them in the post-Reconstruction South. Zora’s desire for personal growth takes her to New York, where she finds work as a domestic servant, while Bles travels to Washington, DC, for an education in politics. Disillusioned by the corruption and hypocrisy of the North, they eventually return home with a new dream altogether.

Drawing on the 1898 overthrow of the Wilmington, North Carolina, government by white supremacists, Charles W. Chesnutt’s classic novel unmasked the racism of the post-Reconstruction South.

Believing fiction to be an invaluable tool for social change, Pauline E. Hopkins used her first novel to challenge the racist and sexist assumptions of her time. Contending Forces operates on an epic scale - with settings ranging from antebellum North Carolina to post-Civil War Boston - and Hopkins surveys this panorama with an eye in particular on the intersections of race, class, and gender relations.

Eric Walrond was a singular voice of the Harlem Renaissance, and Tropic Death is his most famous work - a collection that highlights his particular strength as a writer of short fiction. Over the course of these ten stories, Walrond vividly details the punishing realities of life and labor across the Caribbean, and yet the overall effect is far from grim. These are unsentimental yet startlingly beautiful portraits of the migrant experience, full of distinctive voices striving for an audience in a seemingly implacable world.

Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave begin their lives as childhood friends, but that friendship is not bound to last. Belton (modeled on Booker T. Washington) is an African American integrationist; Bernard (modeled on W. E. B. Du Bois) is a biracial militant, and their lives, like their politics, quickly diverge. When they do meet again, at a Black nationalist community called “the Imperium,” the stakes could not be higher.

A civil rights activist and key figure in African American literary history, Alice Dunbar-Nelson made her mark during the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Violets and Other Tales is her debut (included here in full, save for three stories later updated in The Goodness of St. Rocque). The collection includes poetry, short stories, and essays offering a varied examination of class differences, racial identity, oppression, intolerance, and women’s societal roles. The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories assembles 14 of Dunbar’s short works of fiction.

Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter is rooted not only in the horrific reality of institutional slavery but also in the historical fact of Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings (here represented by the character Currer). In William Wells Brown’s telling, Currer has two daughters by Jefferson, Clotel and Althesa. Both become Jefferson’s legal property when they are born, and both wind up at auction - along with their mother - when Jefferson dies.