guide to african american literature

A Broad Survey of the Major Movements & Most Important Works

Introduction

Since at least 1746, when enslaved woman Lucy Terry composed the ballad poem “Bars Fight,” African American writers have shaped American literature and culture, revolutionizing existing genres and inventing new genres that would endure for centuries. The history of African American literature is rich and varied, encompassing spirituals, memoirs, journalism, poetry, theater, science fiction, and every other literary category on the planet. To help you track the evolution and importance of African American literature, we created this resource guide charting its major movements, defining techniques, essential works, and current social media footprint. As you read on to learn the basics of African American literature, you will also find links to more than 40 invaluable resources on the subject.

Major Movements in African American Literature

In this section, learn about six major time periods and groups of thinkers that have contributed to the definition of African American literature.

1. Early African American Literature

ENDING SLAVERY WITH THE SWORD AND THE PEN

Although the aforementioned Lucy Terry is credited as having produced the oldest piece of African American literature, the first published African American author was Jupiter Hammon, a domestic enslaved person who in 1761 published the poem “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries” as a broadside. Twelve years later, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American to publish a book; her 1773 poetry collection Poems of Religious Subjects, Religious and Moral earned praise from countless important figures of the Colonial Era, including George Washington. Like many early African American writers, both Hammon and Wheatley wrote spirituals that were heavily rooted in the traditions of African American Christian sermons.

At the turn of the 19th century, as the institution of American slavery grew with the expansion of the global cotton industry, many of the most widely read and historically important African American works were “slave narratives.” Some of the most enduring works in the genre were Frederick Douglass’s Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Aside from being great works of literature in their own right, these works hastened the cause of abolitionism by depicting the profound brutality of slavery to Northern audiences.

Learn more about pre-Civil War literature:

The National Humanities Center has an important essay on the best way to read and teach “slave narratives” in the 21st century.
At the Library of Congress, read more about the relationship between antebellum literature and African Americans’ quest for freedom and citizenship.
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery provides a fascinating overview of the life and legacy of Phillis Wheatley.

2. African American Literature in the Post-Slavery Era

BOOKER V. DUBOIS

In the decades following the Civil War and emancipation, the two titans of African American literature were Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Aside from their singular talents and accomplishments as writers, Washington and DuBois encapsulate this era by virtue of their opposing takes on African American social progress. As the scholar Ibram X. Kendi outlines in his 2016 book Stamped From the Beginning, Washington urged African Americans to accept discrimination in the short-term and readily assimilate into mainstream White culture. By contrast, DuBois—particularly in his landmark 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk—called for an immediate end to racism, predicting modern antiracist movements of the 21st century.

This era also brought with it an explosion in African American journalism, exemplified by the tireless work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett to document lynching in the 1890s. Her work, which was syndicated in Black-owned newspapers across the country, continues to be an invaluable resource for modern scholars studying anti-Black terrorism during the Jim Crow era. Other important African American journalists from the post-Civil War era included Jennie Carter, who documented racism in the American West, and Marcus Garvey who wrote a series of influential essays in the early 20th century on black nationalism and Pan Africanism.

Finally, Paul Laurence Dunbar rose to prominence as one of the earliest African American poets to gain national recognition. Writing in the African American dialect of his era, Dunbar helped set the stage for the success of novelists and poets of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

Learn more about literature from the turn of the 20th century:

Read more from PBS Frontline on the debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois.
At The New York Times, learn about how Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s journalism continues to influence modern scholarship on lynching.
Read over a dozen of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s most beloved poems at the Poetry Foundation.

3. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s

ROARING INTO THE MAINSTREAM

In the 20th century, following the end of Reconstruction and the formalization of Jim Crow discrimination and segregation in the U.S. South, millions of African Americans migrated out of rural areas to major cities in the North. Many of the brightest and most ambitious minds gathered in Harlem, Manhattan, which throughout the Roaring Twenties was a hotbed for African American art, music, and literature.

Perhaps no writer is more closely associated with what would be known as the Harlem Renaissance than the poet Langston Hughes. His poetry is known for depicting the lives of working class African Americans, capturing both utter hardship and transcendent joy. Another important writer of the Harlem Renaissance movement was Zora Neale Hurston, whose 1937 novel Their Eyes are Watching God was an immediate critical success among mainstream critics. Though initially criticized by African American contemporaries, the novel received a critical reassessment among Black literary scholars with the publication of a 1975 retrospective on Hurston by The Color Purple author Alice Walker. Today, the novel is widely considered a classic of African American literature.

Learn more about literature from the Roaring Twenties:

Read Alice Walker’s 1975 reassessment of Their Eyes are Watching God, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.”
For the historical context surrounding the explosion of art and culture during the Harlem Renaissance, read this essay published by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture.
Read Langston Hughes’s 1920 poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” one of his earliest and most defining works.

4. Post-War Era to the Civil Rights Movement

The next several decades of African American literature would be shaped in large part by Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son. One of the most successful attempts to place 20th century African American hardship in a social and political context, Native Son was an enormous influence on James Baldwin, whose novels and essays made him one of the defining Black writers and intellectuals of the mid-20th century. Issues of Black identity were crucially important for Wright, Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, whose 1953 classic The Invisible Man won the National Book Award that year.

As in earlier eras, women continued to shape African American literature and American literature more broadly. This was particularly true of the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who in 1950 became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Annie Allen, and Lorraine Hansberry, who became the first African American and youngest dramatist ever to win a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for her classic 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.

All these authors had an enormous impact on the Civil Rights literature of the 1960s, which took on an even more explicitly political tone as writers sought to dismantle segregation and other racist social structures. Two of the most important works of the Civil Rights Era were Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Malcolm X’s 1965 autobiography co-written with Alex Haley.

Learn more about mid-century literature:

Listen to an NPR report on the enduring legacy of Ralph Ellison and The Invisible Man.
The New York Review of Books looks back on Native Son and concludes that depressingly little has changed since Richard Wright wrote his classic.
NBC News’ Lakshmi Gandhi explains why it’s as important to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 2020 as it was 55 years ago.

5. The Black Arts Movement and Post-Civil Rights Era Literature

BLACK POWER, BLACK ART

After Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965, poet Imamu Amiri Baraka helped launch a new movement of urgently motivated political activists and artists known as the Black Arts Movement. After decades during which top African American writers enjoyed critical and popular success among mainstream White audiences, the Black Arts Movement reoriented African American literature toward creating Black art specifically designed for Black audiences for the purpose of social and cultural liberation.

Although much of this literature was written from a hyper-masculine perspective, and while some of the movement’s output was characterized by contemporary and modern critics as sexist, the precepts of the Black Arts Movement influenced and inspired a host of brilliant Black women who would come to define the last quarter century of African American literature. These writers include Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and others.

Learn more about the Black Arts Movement:

Read the Poetry Foundation’s collection of the most important poems associated with the Black Arts Movement.
Watch the American Playhouse’s 1982 performance of Ntozake Shange’s landmark 1976. play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf.
The BBC explains how Octavia Butler’s science fiction novels predicted the future in which we now live.

6. The 21st Century and Beyond

African American literature is as rich and diverse in the 21st century as it’s ever been. There is no shortage of hard-hitting memoirs like Ta-nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me; crushing sociological exposes of contemporary racism like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow; and rich, unforgettable genre fare like N.K. Jemison’s landmark science fiction epic, the Broken Earth Trilogy.

Indeed, a survey of 21st century African American literature reveals artists doing amazing work across every genre imaginable, while inventing new genres along the way. To the extent that a shared philosophy exists among Black writers in 2020, it may be a renewed urgency to address issues of extralegal police shootings, mass incarceration, and other aspects of the criminal justice system that disproportionately affect people of color. Leading the charge in promoting antiracism and an end to structural racism are writers like Ibram X. Kendi, Carol Anderson, Jesmyn Ward, and many many others.

Learn more about literature in the 21st century:

Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to be an Antiracist, has a great must-read list of books on antiracism.
The 21st century has been a golden age for African American fantasy and science fiction. Buzzfeed has a reading list to get you started with these genres .
For a somewhat different take on 21st century African American literature, check out this Pitchfork article on how a group of journalists turned hip-hop into a literary movement.

Literary Techniques in African American Literature

African American literature is so broad and diverse that it would be impossible to define by a small set of qualities and characteristics. Nevertheless, there are a few literary techniques that tend to emerge across all of the movements listed above:

Oral Traditions:

Going back to the earliest known works, the oral traditions of both African folktales and Christian sermons heavily influenced African American literature. These traditions are evident through the extensive use of cadence, alliteration, and repetition, particularly in African American poetry but also in fiction and plays. Read more about oral traditions in African American literature in these remarks by literature professor and critic Darwin T. Turner

Signifying:

According to scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who popularized the phrase, “signifying” is a form of wordplay unique to African American vernacular that emerges across African American literature. Heavily rooted in irony and metaphor, signifying emphasizes the context of particular words and phrases and the associations between them. For more on signifying, read a New York Times review of Gates’s book in which he defines the phrase.

Memoir:

Though common to many cultural literary forms, memoir plays an enormously important role in African American literature. This tradition is rooted in the slave narratives of the 18th and 19th centuries and continues to be a rich genre explored by some of the most important and renowned African American writers of the modern era. For more on this, read Princeton scholar Imani Perry on why she believes 2015 was “The Year of the Black Memoir.”

Required Reading: An African American Lit Book List

Though by no means exhaustive, this reading list will provide you with a broad survey of some of the most important works of African American literature:

Fiction

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937): The Root explains why this work remains important for 21st-century readers.
Native Son by Richard Wright (1940): Chicago Magazine revisits this title 75 years after its publication.
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952): Writing in 2016, The New Yorker argues that this literary work is a “parable for our time.”
Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979): Read Beacon Press’s Teacher’s Guide for this book.
Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987): Read a UC-Santa Cruz interview with Toni Morrison about the book.
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011): Educator Brendan Kiely explains why he teaches this title to his teen students.
Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin (2015-2017): At Tor.com, CD Covington explains the cultural ramifications of the trilogy’s linguistic worldbuilding.
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (2019): In a Time magazine interview, Colson Whitehead explains how America’s racist history lives on.

Nonfiction

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845): Read why educator Nicholas Powers pairs Frederick Douglass’s autobiography with rapper 50 Cent’s 2005 memoir in his literature class.
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. DuBois (1903): Columbia University explains why it included the book on its 2020 Contemporary Civilization syllabus.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1963): Listen to journalist Studs Terkel interview James Baldwin in 1961.
“A Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr. (1963): Read the text in full.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965): History interviews the Brooklyn Historical Society’s Zaheer Ali about the explosive lost chapter of Malcolm X’s autobiography.
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (1984): The LA Review of Books examines the legacy of the work in the wake of the Charlottesville terror attack in 2017.
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (2010): Watch Alexander speak to University of Chicago students about the book.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015): Read The Atlantic’s book club roundtable debate on this nonfiction work.

Poetry

The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes (1926): Read the title poem in Hughes’s landmark 1926 poetry collection.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969): Read Maya Angelou’s landmark poem “Caged Bird.”
The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni by Nikki Giovanni (1996): Oprah Magazine has a list of poems that made Nikki Giovanni a legend.

Theater

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959): Watch Black CAST’s 2015 production of the play.
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange (1976): Shange calls this work a “choreopoem.” What is a choreopoem? The New York Times explains.