African American Fiction Classics

Langston Hughes’ award-winning first novel follows a Black boy’s coming-of-age in a largely white Kansas town.

Originally published in 1912, this novel by James Weldon Johnson was one of the first to present a frank picture of being Black in America.

When a woman returns to her Midwestern hometown as an artist-in-residence to teach puppetry to schoolchildren, her homecoming also means dealing with memories of racism, rejected love–and truths about her family.

When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of Black life.

Ernest J. Gaines’s novella revolves around a courthouse shooting that leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the Black man who “whipped children” to keep order.

This original collection by Paul Laurence Dunbar includes the short novel The Sport of the Gods, Dunbar’s essential essays and short stories, and his finest poems, such as “Sympathy,” all which explore crucial social, political, and humanistic issues at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Black No More is a masterwork of speculative fiction and a hilarious satire of America’s obsession with race.

Nella Larsen’s powerful, thrilling, and tragic tale is about the fluidity of racial identity that continues to resonate today.

In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, James Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.

A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.

A monumental literary event: the newly discovered final novel by seminal Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay, a rich and multilayered portrayal of life in 1930s Harlem and a historical protest for Black freedom.

Jean Toomer’s innovative and groundbreaking novel depicts African American life in the South and North, with a foreword by National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree Zinzi Clemmons.

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia.

The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us — along with her Black female hero — through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

A searing, provocative satire by one of the most important African American novelists of the twentieth century that lays bare the abiding racism and the legacy of slavery on the psyche of white America.

The unexpurgated version of Wright’s electrifying novel shows his determination to write honestly about the hopes and yearnings, the pain and rage of Black Americans with unprecedented intensity and vividness.

This volume presents two landmark novels about the terrible power of race in America from one of the foremost and essential African American novelists of the twentieth century.