Classic African American Fiction

Frederick Douglass was an American abolitionist, women's suffragist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer. He was called both "The Sage of Anacostia" and "The Lion of Anacostia" and is one of the most prominent figures in African-American history and United States history.

This inspirational audiobook encapsulates African American history and invites conversations at all levels. Carole Boston Weatherford’s riveting text is an informative reminder of yesterday, a hopeful image for today, and an aspirational dream of tomorrow. Starting from 1619 and stretching more than four hundred years, this audiobook features such pivotal moments in history as the arrival of enslaved people in Jamestown, Virginia; Nat Turner's rebellion; the integration of the US military; and more.

With no magic, no brawn, and no pirate crew, Zala seeks to steal back the one treasure that matters to her most: Her husband. To succeed she needs a ship - and not just any ship, but the latest, secret invention by the Vaaji Empire. An airship. Zala will have to use her wits to overcome scoundrels and nobles alike on her journey through the clouds. But if she's smart enough, she may just have what it takes to save her husband - and go down in history as the first sky pirate.

Marshall Field Finney was named after a department store and dropped like a hot potato when his mother suddenly packed up and left. Now Marshall lives with his hard-drinking father in a crackerbox house and rides a yellow bus through beautiful St. Louis County to his mostly white suburban school. Caught at a crossroads, Marshall is desperately searching for something to believe in. At stake is only the rest of his 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.

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.

"So this is the little lady that made the big war." The authenticity of Lincoln's words have been questioned, but there is no question that the work fueled the passion and prejudices of countless numbers. It is a work of overwhelming power and persuasions which has outlived even the most severe critics. Notwithstanding its contribution to the abolitionist movement, the book offers a balanced treatment; there is admiration for the best of Southern gentility and the villain is a Vermonter.

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.

Amidst the whir of city life, a girl from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to use her knives to strike fear amongst its most dangerous denizens. But the ghosts from her past are always by her side - and history has appeared on her doorstep to threaten the people she loves most. Can one woman ever sacrifice enough to save an entire community? Trouble the Saints is a dazzling, daring novel - a magical love story, a compelling chronicle of interracial tension, and an altogether brilliant and deeply American saga.

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.

Robert Benjamin Lewis (1802 - 1858) was an African American and Native American author, inventor, and entrepreneur. In the ethnological work Light and Truth, Lewis claims that Adam and Eve were people of color, as were the Egyptians and many great figures of the ancient world, including Julius Caesar and Plato. Denouncing notions of white superiority, he asserts that all humans have a common origin, and pointed to a shared cultural history between Africans and Native Americans.

James Weldon Johnson's emotionally gripping novel is a landmark in black literary history and, more than eighty years after its original anonymous publication, a classic of American fiction. The first fictional memoir ever written by a black, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man influenced a generation of writers during the Harlem Renaissance and served as eloquent inspiration for Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright.

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.

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.

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) is considered the first important Black American novelist. The Conjure Woman is a collection of seven stories that began appearing in magazines in 1887 and were first published together in 1899. The narrator of The Conjure Woman is a White man from the North living in the South who passes along the stories told to him by the ex-slave Julius McAdoo. The narratives provide a realistic picture of the pre-Civil War South, including descriptions of brutish slave owners.

A striking mosaic of prose, poetry, and dramatic dialogue, Jean Toomer’s Cane has come to be considered a masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. Structured as a series of vignettes ripe with longing, passion, violence, and revenge, the haunting novel gives a powerful voice to the interior lives of African Americans in the rural South and urban North. Championed for its unsparing honesty and psychological insight by such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou, Cane shines as a beacon to generations of African-American writers.

When Jackson returns home to his family after an absence of 10 years, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation, he falls in love with Catherine Carmier, setting the stage for conflicts and confrontations which are complex, tortuous, and universal in their implications.

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.

One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn't recognize calls out to him. To Kelly's shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, who was one of Kelly's closest friends in high school - and, before his disappearance nearly 20 years before, skinny, white, and Jewish. Martin then tells an astonishing story: he's had a plastic surgeon perform 'racial reassignment surgery.'