African-American
Novels, stories and memoirs by Black American writers, from slavery to the Harlem Renaissance.
About this shelf
Before the War
Slave narratives and the first novels. William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) is usually counted as the first novel by an African American, and he rewrote it three times over the next fourteen years.
After Reconstruction
Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline Hopkins wrote for a national readership. They often worked inside the popular forms of the day, such as dialect stories, romance and the magazine serial, and turned those forms to their own ends.
The Harlem Renaissance
In the 1920s there were novels, poetry and little magazines from Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen and others. Much of this work entered the public domain only in the last few years.
A Note on Language
These books use the vocabulary of their time, including words the authors themselves were writing against. The texts are reproduced as published.
| No. | Title | Author | Year | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral | Phillis Wheatley | 1773 | Read → |
| 02 | Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave | Frederick Douglass | 1845 | Read → |
| 03 | Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine | William Wells Brown | 1867 | Read → |
| 04 | Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases | Ida B. Wells-Barnett | 1892 | Read → |
| 05 | The Conjure Woman | Charles W. Chesnutt | 1899 | Read → |
| 06 | Up from Slavery: An Autobiography | Booker T. Washington | 1901 | Read → |
| 07 | The Souls of Black Folk | W. E. B. Du Bois | 1903 | Read → |
| 08 | Cane | Jean Toomer | 1923 | Read → |
| 09 | Magnolia Flower | Zora Neale Hurston | 1925 | Read → |
| 10 | The Weary Blues | Langston Hughes | 1926 | Read → |
| 11 | Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver | Zora Neale Hurston | 1927 | Read → |