|
|
|
February
2007 features
books and links about
Black History Month |
In honor of Black History Month, the library is
featuring African American literature. Below is a sample of
seminal works by pioneers in American literature from the Colonial
period to the Harlem Renaissance.
The
collected works of Phillis Wheatley
edited with an essay by John Shields
Available
in a MORE library
Volumes of compelling and rare works of
fiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, essays, and journalism
written by a 19th century black woman.
Slave
narratives
305.567 Sla
William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates Jr. selected
the contents and wrote the notes for this volume. Includes
narratives by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosow, Olaudah Equiano, Nat
Turner, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, Sojourner
Truth, William and Ellen Craft, Harriet Ann Jacobs, and Jacob D.
Green. The ten works collected in this volume demonstrate
how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation
and laid the foundations of the African American literary tradition by
expressing their in anger, pain, sorrow, and courage.
Our
Nig : or, Sketches from the life of a free Black, in a two- story
white house, north, showing that slavery's shadows fall even there
by Harriet Wilson
Available
in a MORE library
This seminal autobiographical novel is believed to have
been the first published novel by an African-American woman. In her
depictions of a young girl named Frado, and her destitute wanderings
through New England, Wilson gives us our clearest, most accurate
account of race relations and perceptions of race in the Antebellum
North.
Autobiographies
by Frederick Douglass
921 Douglass
Includes: Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American
slave; My Bondage and my freedom; and Life and times of Frederick
Douglass. Born a slave, Douglass educated himself, escaped, and
made himself one of the greatest leaders in American history.
His three volume autobiographical narratives are recognized as
classics of both American history and literature. Writing with
the eloquence and fierce intelligence that made him a brilliantly
effective spokesman for abolition and equal rights, Douglas shapes an
inspiring vision of self-realization in the face of monumental odds.
Up
from slavery
by Booker T. Washington
921 Washington
Booker T. Washington's American classic recounts his triumph over the
legacy of slavery, his founding of the Tuskegee Institute, and his
emergence as a national spokesperson for his race.
DuBois:
Writings
by W. E. B. DuBois
818 DuB
Includes The suppression of the African slave-trade, The souls of
black folk, and Dusk of dawn essays. Historian, sociologist,
novelist, editor, and political activist, DuBios was the most gifted
and influential black intellectual of his time. This presents
his essential writings, covering the full span of a restless life
dedicated to the struggle for racial justice.
Stories,
novels, & essays
by Charles W. Chesnutt
Available
in a MORE library
Includes The House Behind the Cedars, a novel
about two African Americans who pass for white in post-Civil War North
Carolina, Charles W. Chesnutt introduces a striking new hero in
American fiction of the color line: John Walden, a young black man who
decides to pass for white in order to earn what he feels is his
rightful share of the American dream.
Without sentimentality, Chesnutt's novel probes deeper than any before
it into the white South's obsessions with race and privilege and still
stands as one of the most authoritative and important explorations of
miscegenation in all of American literature.
The
complete poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar
By Paul Laurence Dunbar
811 Dun
Poems by the first African American
poet to gain national prominence.
The
collected poems of Langston Hughes
by Langston Hughes
811.52 Hug
Here for the first time is a complete
collection of the poetry of Langston Hughes--860 poems that sound the
heartbeat of black life in America during 40 turbulent years. This
rich volume, with its illuminating notes and chronology of Hughes's
life, and a section of poems for children, will be a revelation to
both those familiar with his work and those just discovering it.
There
eyes were watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
F Hur
Initially published in 1937, this novel about a proud, independent
black woman's quest for identity, a journey that takes her through
three marriages and back to her roots, has been one of the most widely
read and highly acclaimed novels in the canon of African-American
literature.
Cane
by Jean Toomer
Available
in a MORE library
The acclaimed exploration of the American racial temperament of the
1920s. Using his own life as a model, Toomer explores the issues of
race and identity that simmer just below the fragile American social
veneer. Organized in three sections, these stories and vignettes are
also interspersed with poetry. Toomer's brilliant interweaving of
black folk culture within themes of miscegenation, black sexuality,
and racial identity and conflict turned this novel into a literary
high point.
My
soul's high song : the collected writings of Countee Cullen, voice of
the Harlem Renaissance
by Countee Cullen
Available
in a MORE library
Cullen (1903-46), Harlem Renaissance
poet and man of letters, is perhaps best known for the couplet ``Yet
do I marvel at this curious thing:/ to make a poet black, and bid him
sing.'' His poems infuse a Keatsean prosody with the existential
concerns of being black, American, and Christian: ``It is a rare and
tantalizing fruit/ Our hands reach for, but nothing absolute.'' Lauded
by educated blacks and whites of the Twenties, Cullen's work has been
neglected in recent years. This long-overdue collection expands a
poetry selection released soon after his death. More poems, a novel,
essays, translations, speeches, an interview by James Baldwin, notes,
and more have been added by Early, whose fine introduction is a moving
portrait of a man whose biography has proven elusive. Highly
recommended.-- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Libray, New York
Infants
of the spring
by Wallace Thurman
Available
in a MORE library
It's 1920s Harlem, and man, the joint is
jumpin'. Folks are coming and going and everything's copacetic as long
as the gin keeps flowing. This is the scene Stephen Jorgenson dives
into when he arrives from Canada for the first time. He is taken to
"The Niggerati Manor," an apartment building in Harlem
inhabited by aspiring artists whose true talents lie in living, and
where everything's black and white - with a lot of grayness in
between. Counterbalancing Stephen's embrace of these folks is Raymond
Taylor, a writer who is the only truly talented artist in the manor.
Raymond's cynical take on the "new Negro artist" is the
tightrope he walks between the love and hatred of himself and his
people. Characters representing Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston,
and Alain Locke all appear, and part of the fun of this book is
figuring out who's who.
The
wedding
by Dorothy West
F Wes
The first novel in 45 years from famed African
American author Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem
Renaissance, the book is a wise and heartfelt story about the shackles
of race and class we all wear -- and the price we pay to break them.
The
book of American Negro poetry : chosen and edited, with an essay on
the Negro's creative genius
by James Weldon Johnson
Available
in a MORE library
James Weldon Johnson declares here in his
preface that there is a need for African-American poets to "work
out a new and distinctive form of expression," and he predicts
that "the undeniable creative genius of the Negro is destined to
make a distinctive and valuable contribution to American poetry."
His anthology went on to become a historic event, for in his selection
of the forty poets collected here, he gathered not only the best of
the Harlem Renaissance writers, but also the post-World War I poets
such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, who went on to challenge
racial stereotypes in an effort to be recognized simply as poets.
The
Harlem reader : a celebration of New York's most famous neighborhood,
from the renaissance years to the twenty-first century
edited by Herb Boyd ; foreword by Howard Dodson
Available
in a MORE library
From Harlem's most revered icons (like Langston Hughes, Duke
Ellington, Ann Petry, and Malcolm X) to voices of a new generation
(including Willie Perdomo, Grace Edwards, and Piri Thomas), The Harlem
Reader gathers a wealth of vital impressions, stories, and narratives
and blends them with original accounts offered by living storytellers,
famous and not so famous. This volume captures the dramatic moments
and personalities at the core of Harlem's ever-evolving story.
|