Classic Novels by Black Authors

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

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.

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

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.

Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison powerfully examines our obsession with beauty and conformity — and asks questions about race, class, and gender with her characteristic subtly and grace.

First published in 1930, Langston Hughes’s award-winning debut novel draws from the author’s childhood in the rural Midwest to paint a moving account of the trials and joys of life in Black communities that, until the novel’s publication, had not seen themselves reflected in American literature. A groundbreaking work, Not Without Laughter established Langston Hughes as a gifted novelist as well as a beloved poet.

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.

Selina Boyce comes of age in 1940s New York as the daughter of two immigrants from Barbados: A free-spirited father she adores and who dreams of returning to his Caribbean island home, and a disciplined, hardworking mother she admires and who is determined to purchase their Brooklyn brownstone. When her father comes into an unexpected inheritance, Selina is torn between his nostalgia for the past and her mother’s ambition for the future, all while negotiating racism, sexuality, Depression-era poverty, and the competing values of African Americans and her West Indian immigrant community.

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

Claude McKay’s first novel, Home to Harlem, was published in 1928 during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay portrays Harlem post-WWI through two Black migrants to New York: Jake, a Southern-born African American longshoreman who deserts the U.S. army and returns to his home in Harlem; and Ray, an educated Haitian immigrant. With his innovative use of Black dialects, McKay portrays a complex world of Black people, both native-born and immigrant, who navigate a dynamic society in the midst of radical change.

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.