Classic African American Fiction

Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him.

June 1957. One hot afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep South, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, shoots his horse, burns his house, and heads north with his wife and child. His departure sets off an exodus of the state’s entire black population, throwing the established order into brilliant disarray. Told from the points of view of the white residents who remained, A Different Drummer stands, decades after its first publication in 1962, as an extraordinary and prescient triumph of satire and spirit.

Fred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up by the police after a brutal double murder and tortured until he confesses to a crime he did not commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from custody and flees into the city’s sewer system. This is the devastating premise of this scorching novel, a never-before-seen masterpiece by Richard Wright. Written at the height of his creative powers, it would see publication in Wright's lifetime only in drastically condensed and truncated form, and ultimately be included in the posthumous short story collection Eight Men.

Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature because of its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through a series of vignettes, Cane uses poetry, prose, and play-like dialogue to create a window into the varied lives of African Americans living in the rural South and urban North during a time when Jim Crow laws pervaded and racism reigned.

The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of Earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world....

In God Ain’t Through Yet, Annette Goode Davis is thankful that her husband, Pee Wee, has decided to give her a second chance after discovering she’s having an affair. But post-betrayal Pee Wee seems a million miles away, and with true forgiveness the bitterest of pills, they may need a miracle to keep their marriage together.

Vanessa Davis Griggs’ Blessed Trinity novels tackle tough questions of faith with humor and honesty. The sixth entry in the series, The Truth Is the Light features the return of the always-entertaining Followers of Jesus Faith Worship Center congregation. Here, the flock’s newest member is causing quite a stir, but he’s not the only one bringing drama into the church house.

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.

At the time of its publication, Wallace Thurman’s debut novel was deeply provocative. This was due not only to its frank considerations of race and sex, but also to its vivid portrait of a Harlem that few other writers had dared to explore. At the heart of this journey into new terrain is Emma Lou Morgan, a Black woman who leaves her “color-struck” Idaho hometown behind and strikes out, first for Los Angeles and later for Harlem—where, unfortunately, discrimination simply takes on a new form.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman has sold over a million copies nationwide since its publication in 1971, making the fictional character of Miss Jane so real many people don’t know she exists only in the imagination of Louisiana-born author Ernest J. Gaines. Miss Jane is 100 years old when she is interviewed by an area high school teacher looking to teach his students more about plantation society in the Deep South. Her story is not only a vivid picture of the South before the dawn of the civil rights era, but also a story of one woman’s survival against overwhelming odds.

With opportunities for black men limited in post-World War II London, Rick Braithwaite, a former Royal Air Force pilot and Cambridge-educated engineer, accepts a teaching position that puts him in charge of a class of angry, unmotivated, bigoted white teenagers whom the system has mostly abandoned. When his efforts to reach these troubled students are met with threats, suspicion, and derision, Braithwaite takes a radical new approach. He will treat his students as people poised to enter the adult world.

When the Watson family—ten-year-old Kenny, Momma, Dad, little sister Joetta, and brother Byron—sets out on a trip south to visit Grandma in Birmingham, Alabama, they don’t realize that they’re heading toward one of the darkest moments in America’s history. The Watsons’ journey reminds us that even in the hardest times, laughter and family can help us get through anything.

Finally available after three decades, a lost classic of the Harlem Renaissance that Langston Hughes acclaimed for its "hard poetic beauty". Eric Walrond (1898 - 1966), in his only book, injected a profound Caribbean sensibility into black literature. His work was closest to that of Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston with its striking use of dialect and its insights into the daily lives of the people around him.

Published in 1861, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an autobiographical account of the author's experiences as a slave in 19th-century North Carolina, from her relatively happy childhood to the brutality she experienced as a teenager and young woman to her eventual escape to the North.

When Sheriff Mapes is summoned to a sugarcane plantation to find a dead Cajun farmer, he knows who committed the crime. Mapes finds himself powerless, however, when nearly 20 elderly black men confess to the murder. Can justice be served, or will the dead man's brutish father pass judgment his way?

These 13 stories by the author of The Invisible Man "approach the elegance of Chekhov" ( The Washington Post) and provide "early explorations of [Ellison's] lifelong fascination with the 'complex fate' and 'beautiful absurdity' of American identity" (John Callahan).

Berry Hamilton was living a pretty good life - up until he was accused of stealing money from his employer. Despite having worked for the family for 20 years, Berry is found guilty of a crime he did not commit and sentenced to prison. As his wife and children turn to the community, they find themselves shunned. Left with no other choice, Fannie Hamilton and her two children, Joe and Kitty, pick everything up and move to Harlem.

The Conjure Woman is a collection of short stories by noted African American author Charles Waddell Chesnutt. It is considered to be one the seminal collections of African American literature.

The author of 30 critically acclaimed works, Walter Mosley has had his novels translated into 23 languages. The Tempest Tales, an Essence Book Club Recommended Read, features Tempest Landry, a black man shot down by an over-eager cop. But that's not the end of the line for Tempest. Unwilling to accept St. Peter's judgment that he spend eternity in Hell, Tempest is sent back to Harlem - guardian angel in tow - to make things right.

This stirring coming-of-age tale unfolds in 1930s rural Kansas. A poignant portrait of African-American family life in the early twentieth century, it follows the story of young Sandy Rogers as he grows from a boy to a man. We meet Sandy's mother, Annjee, who works as a housekeeper for a wealthy white family; his strong-willed grandmother, Hager; Jimboy, Sandy's father, who travels the country looking for work; Aunt Tempy, the social climber; and Aunt Harriet, the blues singer who has turned away from her faith.