African American Literature

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After Tupac and D Foster, published in 2008, is Jacqueline Woodson’s fifth middle grade novel and her 24th book overall. It is a coming-of-age story of three African American girls who are best friends growing up in Queens, NY, in the 1990s. During this time, the cultural icon Tupac Shakur is shot, imprisoned, and ultimately killed in a second shooting. These events have a huge impact on the main characters as they grow up and... Read After Tupac and D Foster Summary

A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines, is an award-winning work of fiction published in 1993. It received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction that same year. The story is arguably a work of historical fiction based on true accounts of young Black men on death row in Louisiana in the 1940s.Plot SummaryThe story opens in a courtroom in 1947 Louisiana, where a 21-year-old Black man named Jefferson, is accused of killing... Read A Lesson Before Dying Summary

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Apex Hides the Hurt, a 2006 novel by American author Colson Whitehead, follows a nameless, emotionally muted nomenclature consultant, or an expert in creating brand names. The novel toggles between the protagonist’s memories of success at his company, and his current consulting assignment—renaming a town. The novel satirizes contemporary American consumer culture and features themes of race and identity. Whitehead uses humor and revelation as key narrative techniques in this story about a man who... Read Apex Hides the Hurt Summary

When Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun premiered in 1959, it was the first play by a black woman to open on Broadway, as well as the first play with a black director. The title comes from Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem,” which asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” The play tells the story of the Youngers, a family who lives together in a small... Read A Raisin in the Sun Summary

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A Soldier’s Play (1981) was written by Charles Fuller. It premiered off-Broadway with the Negro Ensemble Company in 1981, and was arguably the company’s most successful work to date. It ran for nearly 500 performances and earned the Critics Circle Best Play Award and the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for drama. The play is loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1924), an unfinished novella about a well-liked, handsome sailor who is falsely accused of a... Read A Soldier's Play Summary

“A Summer Tragedy” is a short story written by poet and fiction author Arna Bontemps. It was originally published in 1933 in Opportunity and has since been included in multiple anthologies, including Bontemps’s 1973 short story collection The Old South: “A Summer Tragedy” and Other Stories of the Thirties. Focusing on an elderly Black couple who have endured a difficult life of share farming, “A Summer Tragedy” addresses the themes of Desperation and Hopelessness, The... Read A Summer Tragedy Summary

“A True Story, Word for Word as I Heard It” is a short story by Mark Twain, first published in 1874 in the Atlantic Monthly. Mark Twain was an American writer known for such classics as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In its critique of slavery and racism, the story anticipates Huck Finn; it also explores themes of The Possibility of Human Connection, Black Women Defying Racism and Sexism, and... Read A True Story Summary

“Aubade” is a contemporary love poem by American poet Major Jackson. Published in 2017 in Jackson’s fourth collection of poetry Roll Deep, the poem first appeared in The New Yorker in 2015. The title of the poem references a form of love song or poem that marks the dawn—the time of day when lovers must separate. Aubades were popular in medieval times, and unlike a serenade, which accompanies the evening and nightfall, an aubade evokes... Read Aubade Summary

“A Visit to Grandmother” is a short story by American author William Melvin Kelley, first published in his collection Dancers on the Shore (1964). The story centers around Chig, a 17-year-old boy, and his father, Dr. Charles Dunford, as they visit Chig’s grandmother in Nashville, Tennessee. During their visit, Charles challenges issues that have long damaged his relationship with his mother, and the confrontation reaches a breaking point when he exposes his long-held resentment over... Read A Visit to Grandmother Summary

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Originally written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (2018) is the transcribed posthumous autobiography of the life of Oluale “Cudjo Lewis” Kossola (1841-1935), written by Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). Known for her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was a writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and filmmaker. In all her work, she held a special appreciation for Black life and Black culture of the US South. Her works... Read Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" Summary

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Toni Morrison’s Beloved was published in 1987. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Inspired by the real-life story of a runaway African American enslaved woman named Margaret Garner, who killed her own daughter to prevent her capture and enslavement, Beloved tells the story of Sethe, a runaway enslaved woman who takes her daughter’s life in the same manner. This study guide, which addresses physical... Read Beloved Summary

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Ta-Nehisi Coates’s nonfiction book Between the World and Me was published in 2015 by One World, an imprint of Random House. It was met with critical acclaim and won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Biography/Autobiography genre, and the 2016 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. It is a New York Times best-seller and was heralded by iconic literary figure Toni... Read Between the World and Me Summary

Richard Wright’s “Big, Black, Good Man” is available at Esquire’s website and was originally published in the print version of the magazine on November 1, 1957. Told in a limited third-person narration, the story is set in Copenhagen, Denmark and is about racial misunderstanding.Olaf Jensen, the night porter at a cheap waterfront hotel, is on duty the night before his sixtieth birthday. Olaf has had a mostly satisfactory life with his wife, Karen, and feels... Read Big Black Good Man Summary

The short story “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1936) is the first published work of Richard Wright (1908-1960), a celebrated African American author who is best known for his 1940 protest novel Native Son. Most of Wright’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction deal with the experiences of working-class Black people (especially men) in the United States. His protagonists, like “Big Boy,” struggle against overt racism and racist violence in their communities, ultimately facing crises that force them... Read Big Boy Leaves Home Summary

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Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) by Texas native Attica Locke, published by Little, Brown and Company, is a 2018 Edgar and Anthony award-winning mystery novel. It was also selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Kirkus Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2017. The first in the Highway 59 series follows Texas Ranger Darren Mathews through the backroads of Texas in search of justice and reform... Read Bluebird, Bluebird Summary

Bronx Masquerade (2002), a young adult novel by African-American author Nikki Grimes, focuses on the kids in an inner-city English class run by Mr. Ward. When a student Wesley Boone writes a poem to read aloud in class, some of his classmates follow suit, and the classroom becomes an exercise in self-revelation as the power of poetry allows these struggling teenagers to reveal their personal demons. “Open Mike Friday” becomes a tradition in the class... Read Bronx Masquerade Summary

Bud, Not Buddy is a 1999 children’s realistic historical novel by American author Christopher Paul Curtis. Ten-year-old protagonist Bud Caldwell is an orphan living in Flint, Michigan in 1936. Four years after the death of his mother and after a series of abusive and neglectful foster homes, Bud sets out to find his father, whom he believes is the locally famous jazz musician Herman E. Calloway of Grand Rapids. Bud encounters a host of characters... Read Bud, Not Buddy Summary

“Cat in the Rain,” a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway, was first published in the 1925 collection In Our Time. Hemingway’s story, like much of his work, is semi-autobiographical and based on his experience as an expatriate in Europe after World War I. Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, shared a love of cats, and it’s thought he wrote this story for her while they lived in Italy and France. The short story... Read Cat in the Rain Summary

Marilyn Nelson is part of a coterie of writers who published in the late-1970s and 1980s after the revolutionary fervor of the Black Arts Movement. Though the period during which Nelson wrote is less acknowledged than those aforementioned, it was a time when diverse Black poetic talents emerged. Nelson’s contemporaries included Afaa Michael Weaver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Melvin Dixon, and Essex Hemphill. Their work grappled with the aftermath of the Vietnam War... Read Chosen Summary

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Deacon King Kong was published in 2020 and written by American author James McBride. It is an example of near-historical fiction written about American cities and social issues. McBride’s 1995 memoir about growing up in a mixed-race family in Brooklyn, The Color of Water, was both a commercial and critical success, and his own life experience aligns with some of the narratives and issues in Deacon King Kong. McBride’s novel The Good Lord Bird won... Read Deacon King Kong Summary

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Harryette Mullen’s “Dim Lady” may remind some readers of 17th century English playwright and poet William Shakespeare’s well-known “Sonnet 130,” in which the speaker of the poem makes a mockery of his beloved’s physical appearance. During Shakespeare’s time, fashion encouraged poets to write flowery poetry that extolled the virtues and the beauty of their beloved. However, the speaker of this sonnet toys with poetic conventions of the time, describing the physical attributes of the speaker’s... Read Dim Lady Summary

Zora Neale Hurston’s “Drenched in Light” is set in 1920s Florida and follows a single day of a young girl named Isis Watts, or Isie. The setting of a small town right outside of Orlando resembles Hurston’s own childhood in Eatonville. Published in 1924 by Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, “Drenched in Light” debuted early in Hurston’s career and includes some of her recurring themes dealing with race, gender, and identity. Hurston went on... Read Drenched in Light Summary

“Ego Tripping,” also known as “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why),” is one of American poet Nikki Giovanni’s most well-known poems. Giovanni first published this poem in 1972, which is the year that also marks Giovanni’s first trip to Africa, three years after the birth of her son. As the title of the poem suggests, this poem is a fulsome celebration of the many facets of Giovanni’s identity as a Black woman. Written... Read Ego Tripping Summary

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“Everyday Use” is a short story by Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker. First published in Walker’s 1973 story collection In Love and Trouble, the story centers on a figure marginal to American literature at the time: a working-class black woman in the American South. The story’s interest in the way gender, race, and class intersect is characteristic of Walker’s work; in fact, it was Alice Walker who, later in her career, would coin the... Read Everyday Use Summary

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Fire Shut Up in My Bones by the American author Charles M. Blow was published in 2014. The book is a nonfiction memoir of his childhood and early adulthood in the American South. Blow is unflinchingly honest in the details of his own abuse and how he carried that abuse with him for years. Blow is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and an anchor for the Black News Channel. Fire Shut Up... Read Fire Shut Up in My Bones Summary

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“Flying Home” is a 1944 short story by Ralph Ellison. The story was published posthumously in a collection of the same name. The story was named after a jazz composition written by Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton. A legend surrounding the song claims that Hampton improvised the melody to the song while nervously waiting to board his first flight on an airplane.The story “Flying Home” is about Todd, a young black air force candidate in... Read Flying Home Summary

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Often called a prelude to Shakespeare’s Othello, Harlem Duet tells the story of Othello and his first wife, Billie—the woman he married before Desdemona. Their history is told through the lives of three couples, each named Othello and Billie, during eras of special significance in the Black American Experience: 1860, prior to the Emancipation Proclamation; 1928, at the height of the historic Harlem Renaissance; and 1997, post-civil rights and pre-21st century. Written by Canadian playwright... Read Harlem Duet Summary

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Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad is a 1955 biography by American author Ann Petry. This book takes the reader on a journey through Harriet Tubman’s life, from her birth to enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation to her death as a free woman in New York in 1913. Tubman is a well-known figure in American history and is best known for her heroic actions as a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. After escaping... Read Harriet Tubman Summary

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I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness, to The Blind Side, and Beyond (2011) is a memoir written by NFL player Michael Oher and journalist Don Yaeger. It tells Oher’s story in his own words, describing his childhood and teen years up to his rookie season in the NFL. His story was first brought to the public’s attention in Michael Lewis’s book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, published in 2006. This book was made... Read I Beat the Odds Summary

If Beale Street Could Talk is a novel by James Baldwin (1924-1987), a critically acclaimed African American writer on matters of race and the African American experience. Originally published in 1974, the novel gained fresh attention with Barry Jenkins’ film adaptation in 2019. The novel is the love story of salesclerk Clementine “Tish” Rivers and budding sculptor Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt, African American natives of Harlem whose lives are derailed in the late 1960s to early... Read If Beale Street Could Talk Summary

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I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is an autobiographical novel by Maya Angelou. Angelou discusses the struggles of growing up African American in the 1950s. The novel has themes of overcoming adversity and trauma, both used as a general metaphor for the struggle against racism. Angelou wrote the novel as a challenge to create literature out of an autobiography, and what emerged is a classic that is still revered today.The novel begins on a... Read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Summary

Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem is an 1899 novel by the African-American writer, minister, and activist Sutton E. Griggs. The “Imperium” of the title is an underground organization of Negro activists who plan to establish an independent state in Texas. Two men struggle for control of the Imperium: Bernard Belgrade, a light-skinned man who has “passed” as white and been educated at Harvard, and yet has been left severely psychologically... Read Imperium in Imperio Summary

The memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is an account of the life of Harriet Ann Jacobs, who calls herself “Linda Brent” in the narrative. Written in the tradition 18th-century writer Olaudah Equiano, Jacobs’s work joins that of her American contemporaries and fellow anti-slavery activists Solomon Northrup and Frederick Douglass. It is a key text for understanding the conditions of the lives of the enslaved in the Southern United States in... Read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Summary

Invisible Man was published in 1952 and written by African American author Ralph Ellison. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, and Ellison was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1985 for his contributions to American literature. In addition to his fiction, he wrote essays and was a professor, teaching at several prestigious American universities including Yale University, Bard College, New York University, the University of Chicago, and Rutgers University. He... Read Invisible Man Summary

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Jazz by Toni Morrison is the second installment of the Beloved trilogy. Morrison outlines the entirety of the plot in the first paragraph of the novel, allowing the rest of the text to explore the histories and emotional landscapes of the characters. Set in Harlem in the 1920s, Joe Trace has an affair with a young woman named Dorcas. When Dorcas later rejects Joe, he relentlessly searches for her. Joe sees Dorcas dancing with another... Read Jazz Summary

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Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is the third in a series of plays August Wilson wrote examining the African-American experience in the twentieth century. The play is set in Pittsburgh in 1911 against the historical backdrop of the “Great Migration” of African-Americans leaving the poverty and Jim Crow laws of the American South for employment and better lives in the manufacturing cities of the North. The play takes place in the boarding house run by... Read Joe Turner's Come and Gone Summary

The 1979 novel Kindred was written by Octavia E. Butler, a Black author from California who wrote science fiction that challenged white hegemony. The novel tells the story of Edana “Dana” Franklin, a young Black woman in 1976 whose connection to a young white boy named Rufus Weylin allows her to time travel to 1800s Maryland. As she jumps between 1976 and the 1800s, she learns how she and Rufus are connected, and she must survive... Read Kindred Summary

American author Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) wrote “King of the Bingo Game” in 1944. The short story was originally published in the New York literary journal Tomorrow in November 1944 and is widely considered a precursor to his classic novel Invisible Man (1953). Ellison was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and is considered one of the most important American authors of the 20th century. Invisible Man won a National Book Award in 1953, and... Read King of the Bingo Game Summary

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This guide is based on the revised version of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," published as the fifth essay in Why We Can't Wait (1964).King's letter is a response to another open letter, "A Call for Unity," published in The Birmingham News and collectively authored by eight Alabama clergymen who argued that the protests were not an appropriate response to conditions in Birmingham.King opens the letter by explaining that he is responding... Read Letter From Birmingham Jail Summary

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Gloria Naylor published Linden Hills in 1985, three years after the publication of her debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place. While Naylor’s debut novel focuses on women living in an impoverished housing development, Linden Hills examines an affluent black community through the eyes of two young men: Lester, a Linden Hills resident, and Willie, an outsider living on Wayne Avenue.The Linden Hills neighborhood is the “place to be” (260) in Wayne County, with its... Read Linden Hills Summary

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“Love Song for Alex, 1979” is a lyric sonnet that Margaret Walker wrote for her husband. The poem is frequently labeled a sonnet because of its 14 lines, though it doesn’t follow the strict rhyme scheme of a traditional sonnet. In the style of lyric poetry, the poem expresses Walker’s warm feelings for her husband. Though it doesn’t reveal a narrative, we can glean some details about the couple’s relationship from the poem.Poet BiographyMargaret Walker... Read Love Song for Alex, 1979 Summary

Maud Martha (1953) is a fictional narrative by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. The book is written in an experimental style combining poetic language and a nonlinear narrative. Each chapter is a vignette, a quick glimpse into an everyday scene in the life of the title character. Brooks’s only novel, Maud Martha was praised for its depiction of ordinary people and everyday life in Chicago. This guide is based upon the 1993 Third World Press... Read Maud Martha Summary

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Miracle's Boys (2000) by American author Jacqueline Woodson follows a seventh grade boy grieving the recent death of his mother. The novel won the 2001 Coretta Scott King Award, given to the best book primarily intended for an African-American youth audience. Woodson is a prominent writer. She received the National Book Award for Children’s Literature in 2014 for her novel Brown Girl Dreaming. Miracle's Boys centers around themes of guilt, emotional trauma, gang violence, and brotherly love... Read Miracle's Boys Summary

Money Hungry is a 2001 middle-grade novel by American author Sharon G. Flake published by Little, Brown and Company. A Coretta Scott King Honor book, Money Hungry is the first book in Flake’s Raspberry Hill series. It explores 13-year-old Raspberry Hill’s hunger for money and the lengths to which she will go to acquire it. Stemming from a period of homelessness in her childhood, Raspberry will do almost anything to earn enough money to move... Read Money Hungry Summary

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Mules and Men is a work of nonfiction published in 1935 by the American author Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston, a student of anthropology, used ethnographic research methods to collect and record Black folklore in the American South. Consisting of two parts, the work first details some folktales elicited directly from residents of rural folklore, and secondly describes several hoodoo practitioners in New Orleans. This book explores themes of establishing origins and the difference between honesty... Read Mules and Men Summary

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Richard’s Wright’s debut novel Native Son was an immediate success upon its publication in 1940, selling 250,000 copies in three weeks. Today, it is widely recognized as not only Wright’s greatest work, but as one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century. In his essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” (1940), Wright explains that he based the protagonist of the novel on five young Black men he had known as a child. These... Read Native Son Summary

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New Kid by Jerry Craft is a 2019 graphic novel and winner of the Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award. Jim Callahan is responsible for the coloring. Craft is the creator of the 1990 comic strip Mama’s Boyz and Class Act, the 2020 companion story to this book. New Day focuses on an artistic middle school student who makes friends and builds confidence in himself as he navigates race and class issues at... Read New Kid Summary

Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Ninth Ward is a realistic middle grade novel that follows 12-year-old Lanesha, a resident of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward neighborhood, in the days surrounding Hurricane Katrina, a devastating storm that hit the Gulf Coast in 2005. Lanesha must rely on her resourcefulness, resilience, and fortitude to survive the storm and subsequent flooding of the Ninth Ward. First published in 2010 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, the book earned a School... Read Ninth Ward Summary

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On the Come Up, published in 2019, is the second novel by acclaimed young adult author Angie Thomas. It takes place in the same neighborhood as Thomas’s first novel, The Hate U Give (2017), but aside from occasional references to the murder and riots in Garden Heights, On the Come Up features a new cast of characters. The book received numerous awards, including the American Library Association’s Top Ten Books for Young Adults, and it... Read On the Come Up Summary

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Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise was published in 1997, just a few years after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. According to Morrison, it is the last book of a trilogy that includes Beloved and Jazz. Morrison is an esteemed American novelist, having also received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1998) and the Coretta Scott King Award for Authors (2005), among other awards. She was educated at Howard University and Cornell University, and... Read Paradise Summary

Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral recounts the story of a young Black woman in the 1920s who decides to pass as white. Ostensibly a coming-of-age story, the novel features a complex treatment of racial barriers and gender inequalities. While the trajectory of the novel is straightforward and relatively typical for the bildungsroman—young woman leaves home, discovers herself through a series of obstacles she must overcome, and finally learns how to... Read Plum Bun Summary

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Content Warning: Please note that this guide discusses topics in the book such as rape, sexual abuse, incest, slurs, profanity, drugs, and drug addiction.Sapphire is the pen name of author Ramona Lofton. She published her first novel, Push, in 1996; in 2009 it was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film Precious. Sapphire continued the story with a 2011 sequel called The Kid, which focuses on Abdul, Precious’s son. Push is narrated by Precious, a Black... Read Push Summary

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Roots is a 1976 historical fiction novel by Alex Haley. Haley served in the United States Coast Guard during World War II and as a military journalist after the war. Prior to writing Roots, Haley interviewed famous Black Americans and ghostwrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which has remained a bestselling work since its publication in 1965. In Roots, Haley combines his journalistic experience with Black America and his family’s oral history, bolstered with research... Read Roots Summary

“Roselily” is the opening story of Alice Walker’s debut collection, In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women. It was published in 1973, ten years before Walker became the first Black American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Color Purple. “Roselily” is a stream-of-consciousness narrative that intercuts incomplete, italicized phrases from marriage vows with the title character’s expansive reflections on her life, her impending marriage, and the sociopolitical tensions... Read Roselily Summary

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Salvage the Bones tells the story of the Batiste family in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, in the twelve days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Claude Batiste’s wife, mother of Randall, Skeetah (Jason), Esch and Junior, died a few years ago, right after Junior was born. The kids still live with their father, in an area called the Pit. They are a poor, black family, who mainly survive on what Claude can make by salvaging and then... Read Salvage the Bones Summary

Scorpions is a young adult, coming-of-age novel written by best-selling children’s author Walter Dean Myers. Like many of Myers’s works, the book is based on his experience of growing up in New York City’s historically African American Harlem neighborhood. Exploring themes of brotherhood and masculinity, love and loyalty, race, class, and curtailed opportunity, the narrative follows 12-year-old Jamal Hicks as he is confronted with a life-changing dilemma: whether or not to step into the shoes... Read Scorpions Summary

Seven Guitars, which premiered in 1995 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and transferred to Broadway in 1996, is the seventh play in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle, also known as the Pittsburgh Cycle. This series, consisting of ten plays that are each set in a different decade of the 20th century, explore the lives of African Americans during each era. With the exclusion Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), which takes place in 1920s Chicago... Read Seven Guitars Summary

“Slave on the Block” is a short story by Langston Hughes that originally appeared in the September 1933 issue of Scribner's Magazine. The story was later published in The Ways of White Folks, a 1934 collection of Hughes’s short stories.This study guide, based on the 1990 Vintage Classics print edition, quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.Anne and Michael Carraway are affluent white bohemians who live in Greenwich Village—and often visit Harlem—during the... Read Slave on the Block Summary

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Solitary (HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2019) is a memoir by the activist Albert Woodfox that recounts more than four decades in solitary confinement, largely at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. It was nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Woodfox describes how the poverty and racism he endured growing up led him into crime, how the racism of individuals and institutions turned his initial... Read Solitary Summary

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“Spunk” is a short story by Zora Neale Hurston published in 1925. Set in the rural Southern United States, “Spunk” follows the conflict that ensues when one man pursues another man’s wife. The story’s publication helped establish Hurston as a significant literary voice during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1989, George C. Wolfe adapted the story, along with content from two others by Hurston, into a play by the same name. Citations in this guide correspond... Read Spunk Summary

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Ibrahim Kendi’s comprehensive history of racial thought in the US, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, was published in 2016. Organized around the lifespans of five of the most influential or representative individuals in racial thought across American history, the text spans centuries, offering an overview of the enduring and evolving forms of racist ideology in America.Kendi’s book incorporates conversations in science, literature, visual and musical arts, politics, and... Read Stamped From the Beginning Summary

Sula, written by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, was first published in 1973. Morrison was the author of 11 novels and four works of nonfiction. Sula was her second novel, following her 1970 début The Bluest Eye. Morrison published both novels while still working as an editor at Random House, where she edited books by Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Gayl Jones. Morrison was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song... Read Sula Summary

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Written in 1994 by Sharon M. Draper, Tears of a Tiger incorporates various modes of writing, including personal essays, newspaper articles (formal writing), journal entries, and conversations to convey the story of a teenage boy’s descent into grief, guilt, and suicidal ideation following a car crash in which he, as the driver, causes the death of a good friend. The novel explores the importance of mental health in high school students, the effects of drunk... Read Tears of a Tiger Summary

Written by American writer and social critic James Baldwin in 1954, “The Amen Corner” is a three-act play that portrays the incongruity of religious idealism and harsh reality in an African American community plagued by poverty and racial prejudice. The play follows a respected female pastor, Margaret Alexander, as she leads a church that meets in a storefront in the middle of the twentieth century. Margaret’s fears and suffering from her past have led her... Read The Amen Corner Summary

Published anonymously in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is James Weldon Johnson’s fictional memoir centered on how a talented man born to a Black mother and a white father after the Civil War became white in the early-20th century. Johnson, an important critical and artistic contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, published the novel under his own name in 1927 during the height of the movement. The novel is an important bridge between the... Read The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Summary

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a nonfiction memoir published in 1965 by American human rights activist Malcolm X, in collaboration with American author Alex Haley. The book is the result of numerous interviews Haley conducted in the two years leading up to Malcolm’s assassination in February 1965. It covers Malcolm’s upbringing in Michigan, his career as a burglar and drug dealer in New York and Boston, his conversion to Islam in prison, his involvement... Read The Autobiography of Malcolm X Summary

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, published in 1993 by Harvard University Press, combines historical, social, political, and cultural dimensions to reconceptualize the contours of Western modernity. Paul Gilroy, noted sociologist and cultural historian, proposes that modernity can be better understood through the analytical frame of the Black Atlantic, a transnational, intercultural, fractal structure of Black political and expressive cultures in the West. Reflections of experiences of modernity by early Black Atlantic intellectuals and... Read The Black Atlantic Summary

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The Coldest Winter Ever, by Sister Souljah, is a work of urban and literary fiction, published in 1999. The novel chronicles the life of Winter Santiaga, the young daughter of a prominent and extremely wealthy drug lord. While the Santiaga family originally lives in the Brooklyn housing projects, they soon move to a mansion in Long Island. Winter is used to living a life of opulence; she wears the latest designer fashions, gets her nails... Read The Coldest Winter Ever Summary

The Colored Museum is a play by Tony Award-winning dramatist George C. Wolfe. The play premiered in March 1986 at Crossroads Theatre Company in New Jersey.A satire of modern conventions surrounding African American identity, The Colored Museum is set in a fictional museum where a collection of 11 “exhibits” have been mounted for public viewing. These exhibits take the form of sketches performed by an ensemble of five Black performers—two men and three women. Direct... Read The Colored Museum Summary

The Color of Water is a nonfiction autobiography published in 1996 by the American author and musician James McBride. Subtitled A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, The Color of Water chronicles the author’s challenges growing up in the 1960s and 1970s as a child with a white Jewish mother and Black father. Interspersed with the author’s recollections are interview transcripts describing his mother’s abusive upbringing as an Orthodox Jewish woman living in the... Read The Color of Water Summary

The Color Purple is an epistolary novel—a novel told in letter form—in which Alice Walker traces the gradual liberation of Celie, a poor, Black woman who must overcome abuse and separation from her beloved sister Nettie. Set in the South and an unnamed African country during the 1930 to 1940s, the novel is a study in the ways in which Black women use their faith, relationships, and creativity to survive racial and sexual oppression. The... Read The Color Purple Summary

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James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) comprises two autobiographical essays in which the author confronts the racial issues and tensions that he believes corrupt and deform American life and the American dream. Baldwin’s essays exemplify and precursor many of the elements and arguments central to the Civil Rights movement. Please note: Throughout the text, Baldwin uses the racial labels/language common at the time he was writing. This study guide, which uses the Vintage Reissue... Read The Fire Next Time Summary

“The Flowers,” a short story by Alice Walker, considers the impact of the Jim Crow South on a young Black girl’s emotional development and social awareness. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983—along with a National Book Award—for her critically acclaimed work The Color Purple (1982). Her experience growing up poor in the segregated sharecropping community of Eatonton, Georgia, as well as her advocacy as a Womanist activist, inform the personal and social... Read The Flowers Summary

“The Gilded Six-Bits” is a short story written by Zora Neale Hurston and originally published in 1933 in Story magazine. The story explores themes of Sex, Physical Desire, and Marriage, The Function and Morality of Money, and Appearance Versus Reality. Hurston, in addition to being a noted African American author, was also an anthropologist and folklorist. She is best known for her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. “The Gilded Six-Bits” is Hurston’s most... Read The Gilded Six-Bits Summary

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The Intuitionist (1999) is a postmodern novel by American author Colson Whitehead. It is set in an unnamed city that resembles New York in the 1940s, but with one major difference: in this city, elevators (or “vertical transport”) have enormous political and economic clout. The City’s Department of Elevator Inspectors is collapsing into a corrupt power-struggle between “Empiricist” inspectors, who perform mechanical testing to establish the safety of an elevator, and the new breed of... Read The Intuitionist Summary

Zora Neale Hurston, a writer and anthropologist associated with the Harlem Renaissance, published her second and most famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937. Set in Central and South Florida, the novel follows protagonist Janie Crawford’s evolution from impressionable, idealistic girl to self-confident woman. Famed for her work as an ethnographer and an author, Hurston chronicled contemporary issues in the Black community with honesty. While somewhat unrecognized in her time, Hurston’s writing came... Read Their Eyes Were Watching God Summary

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (November 2010) is a novel by award-winning author Walter Mosley. Mosley has enjoyed a distinguished literary career, penning over forty books in the genres of mystery, science fiction, and political nonfiction. He is the first Black recipient of a National Book Foundation Medal in the category of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Mosley’s father was African American, and his mother was Jewish with Russian ancestry. Mosley identifies strongly with... Read The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Summary

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“The Man Who Lived Underground” is a short story written by Black American writer Richard Wright. He originally conceived it as a novel. However, when he failed to secure a publisher, he shortened the story for publication in the literary journal Accent in 1942. A longer version was published as a novella in 1945 in Cross Section: A Collection of New American Writing. Wright died two months before the story’s inclusion in a 1961 anthology... Read The Man Who Lived Underground Summary

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In Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” the writer presents his argument regarding the creative limitations Black Americans face. Initially published in 1926, the essay traces a short, powerful argument that relies both on Hughes’s own identity as an artist as well as his critical observations of US society. As a Black author writing in the early 20th century, Hughes uses the terms “Negro” and “black” interchangeably; this study guide exclusively uses... Read The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain Summary

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a nonfiction book published in 2010 by American author and legal scholar Michelle Alexander. The book argues that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration operate as tools of racialized social control and oppression, not unlike the system in place during the Jim Crow era in the American South. The winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, The New Jim Crow continues... Read The New Jim Crow Summary

Like his 2016 bestseller, The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (Whitehead is only the fourth writer in history to win two Pulitzers). The Nickel Boys describes life in a reform school from the point of view of young Black teenager. Whitehead based Nickel Academy on the real life Dozier School, a Florida facility that ran for over a century, until a university investigation publicized its racist... Read The Nickel Boys Summary

“The Passing of Grandison” is a short story by Charles W. Chesnutt published in his 1899 collection The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. This study guide refers to the free, open-access ebook published by Full Text Archive.Content Warning: The source text depicts slavery in the pre-Civil War South and contains outdated and offensive terms for Black Americans. This guide will obscure the author’s use of the n-word.The story takes... Read The Passing of Grandison Summary

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IntroductionAugust Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson premiered in 1987 at Yale Repertory Theatre starring a young, unknown Samuel L. Jackson as Boy Willie. The play opened on Broadway in 1990 with Charles S. Dutton (Boy Willie), S. Epatha Merkerson (Berniece), and Jackson in his Broadway debut as Dutton’s understudy; it earned five Tony nominations, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play award. It also won the... Read The Piano Lesson Summary

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“The Rockpile” is a short story by the novelist, essayist, and civil rights activist James Baldwin. Although it was originally published in Baldwin’s only short story collection, 1965’s Going to Meet the Man, it was likely written much earlier, as it uses characters that appear in his 1953 semi-autobiographical debut novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain. This guide refers to the 1995 First Vintage International edition of Going to Meet the Man.“The Rockpile” takes... Read The Rockpile Summary

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The Salt Eaters (1980) by Toni Cade Bambara is set in the fictional town of Claybourne, Georgia, in the late 1970s. The style of the novel is experimental and nonlinear. It follows stories and characters linked by themes more than plot. It moves between the past, present, and future in the minds and actions of different characters. The novel centers on the spiritual healing Velma receives from Minnie after a mental health crisis and spirals... Read The Salt Eaters Summary

The Season of Styx Malone (2018) is a contemporary realistic middle grade novel written by Kekla Magoon. Caleb Franklin, 10, seeks a summer of unique adventures to prove he is the opposite of ordinary, despite his father’s insistence that Caleb and his brother Bobby Gene never stray beyond the town limits. Then Caleb meets Styx Malone, a cool, daring 16-year-old boy in the foster care system who shows the Franklin brothers a quick way to... Read The Season of Styx Malone Summary

Paul Beatty is the author of the 2015 novel The Sellout—a satire that makes fun of contemporary norms around race and identity. In the novel, Beatty applies his no-holds-barred idea of comedy to segregation, slavery, police brutality, and countless tragic and fraught issues that people typically treat with extreme seriousness and sensitivity. Through the main character, Me, the book provides an ironic and unexpected take on themes like Racial and Personal Identity and Capitalism’s Power... Read The Sellout Summary