Notable African American Authors
Early African American Writers
Phyllis Wheatley (poet)
Wheatley, born in Africa, is largely considered the first African-American professional writer. She was a slave in Boston. Her poetry including a published book, gained her acclaim and eventual freedom as well as some income.
Ida B. Wells (journalist)
Wells, an strong crusader against racial injustice and “lynch law” wrote and edited newspapers, like The Free Speech and pamphlets and books such as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She was also a founding member of the NAACP.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
The most popular African American poet of his day, also a fiction writer and playwright. Dunbar won appreciation from Black and White audiences in the 1890s. His work includes the poetry collection Oak & Ivy and Lyrics of A Lowly Life.
Frances E.W. Harper
Harper, a free black woman born in Maryland, was a published short story writer and poet. Her most notable poems dealt with slave motifs including “Slave Mother” “Slave Auction” and “Bury Me In A Free Land.” All were published before 1901. She was also one of the first African American female novelists.
Modern Era Writers
James Weldon Johnson
Johnson, who wrote, among other things “Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing”, was also an editor and dramatist who promoted African American literature and culture leading up to the Harlem Renaissance. His work a sermon anthology God’s Trombones.
Langston Hughes
Hughes, a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance is best known for his short but meangingful, imagery-laden poems about life as an African American in the U.S. Poems include “I, Too, Sing America”, “Mother to Son”, and maybe his most famous work “Harlem” which begs the famous question “What happens to a dream deferred.” He also wrote successful sketches about a character called “Simple”, and was playwright.
Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston is the most famous novelist to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. Her novels include Their Eyes We WatchingGod which was recently turned into a television movie and tells the story of a Black woman seeking love and liberation. Both her novels and short stories often take place in or around Eatonville, FL, the black-founded town where she grew up. Hurston’s style is often marked by her use of southern Black dialect and other folk elements. (Hurston studied anthropology and collected folk stories in the U.S and Carribean.)
Other Harlem Renaissance Authors:
Claude McKay, poet
Jean Toomer, author of Cane
Countee Cullen, poet
Dorothy West, fiction writer
Richard Wright
Richard Wright was groundbreaking author, often writing about the effects of racism in America and sometimes achieving success with white audiences. He is know for novels Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and for his 1945 autobiography Black Boy which tells the story of his youth, from the isolation of his very religious family, to his education, to his dealings with the brutually racists south and migration north.
James Baldwin
James Baldwin was a youth-preacher turned writer of novels, plays, memoir and essays. His work “Notes of a Native Son” was a response to Wright’s book. His essays on civil rights appear in the collections The Fire Next Time and Nobody KnowsMy Name. His novels like Another Country, Giovanni’s Room, and Go Tell It On the Mountain dealt with personal conflicts, mixed in with sexuality and race.
Other notable writers of the era:
Lorraine Hansberry, playwright, “A Raisin In The Sun”
Ralph Ellison, novelist, Invisible Man
Contemporary Era Authors:
Toni Morrison:
Joining such authors as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner in the pantheon of American’s who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison is best known perhaps for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Beloved which was turned into a movie by Oprah Winfrey. Her novels also include The Bluest Eye, Jazz, Paradise, and Song of Solomon. She was award the Nobel Prize for bein an author “”who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”
Maya Angelou:
Angelou’s autobiographical book I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is a staple of the American school reading canon, inviting students to explore her story of growing up in the segregated south. She has written subsequent memoirs, plays, music. Her poetry collections include Phenomenal Woman.
Edward P. Jones
Jones’ first published book, Lost In The City, was a collection of short stories about disparate African Americans living in contemporary Washington, DC. His follow-up work, The Known World, is a novel covering a different time and situation: generations of American slaves in Virginia. The Known World won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2004.
Alice Walker:
Alice Walker,a daughter of sharecroppers, is best known for her book The Color Purple which was made into a movie by Steven Speilberg and recently, made into a Broadway Musical. She is also the author of short stories and poetry and was credited for re-discovering and re-popularizing the work of Zora Neale Hurston.
John Edgar Wideman:
Wideman’s most famous work is probably the novel Philadelphia Fire, a complex story told with varying points of view and other devices, set around the firebombing of a Black Philadelphia neighborhorhood by the city government. He won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for that book and previously for Sent for You Yesterday, making him the only author to win the prize twice. He is also a writer of nationally published articles, a memoir about his incarcerated brother, and is editor of various anthologies.
August Wilson
The late August Wilson is known for his award-winning stage plays chronicling Black American life over the decades, with each play representing a decade. His work includes Pulitzer Prize winnners Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and The Piano Lesson, and Fences.
Other notable contemporary authors:
Walter Mosley (mystery/fiction writer)
Toni Cade Bambara (novelist)
Terry MacMillan (novelist)
Jamaica Kincaid (novelist)
Ernest J. Gaines
Nikki Giovanni (poet)
Rita Dove (Former U.S. Poet Laureate)
E. Lynn Harris (novelist)
