The first novel ever published by an African American, this incendiary, passionate tale is about Thomas Jefferson's secret mulatto daughter and her sale into slavery. "Clotel" is a jarring look at the history of race in America and an important historical document in its own right. ...More

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This classic story about a displaced Southern family's struggle to survive and prosper in early Harlem was one of the first novels to depict the harsh realities of ghetto life. Introduction by William Andrews, scholar of the Harlem Renaissance and of Antebellum literature. ...More

First published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God is Zora Neale Hurston's most highly acclaimed novel. A classic of black literature, 'Their Eyes Were Watching God belongs in the same category--with that of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway--of enduring American literature'.--Saturday Review. ...More

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As much a historical document as it is a novel, this 1946 winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship is the poignant and unblinkingly honest story of a young black woman's struggle to live and raise her son by herself amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. ...More

One of only a handful of novels published by black women during the forties, the story of ambitious Cleo Judson is a long-time cult classic. "The Living Is Easy" is delightfully wry and ironic humor-even bitchiness-of the novel coexists with a challenging moral and social complexity.
"A powerful work."-"Essence"
"Dorothy West is a brisk storyteller with an eye for ironic detail...a deft stylist and writer of social satire."-"Ms."
"Long beloved for its wry and ironic humor, this novel continues to delight and challenge readers."-"Feminist Bookstore News"
* Alternate of the Book-of-the-Month and Quality Paperback Book Clubs *
Suggested for course use in:
African-American studies
20th-century U.S. literature ...More

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny: by chance, it was for murder and rape. "Native Son" tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection of the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America. ...More

"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. ...More

In this classic reissue by Ellison, an African-American man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility. ...More

"This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960's. In this woman Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure, a woman equipped to stand beside William Faulkner's Dilsey in "The Sound And The Fury." Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has 'endured, ' has seen almost everything and foretold the rest. Gaines' novel brings to mind other great works "The Odyssey for the way his heroine's travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and "Huckleberry Finn for the clarity of her voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story in it all." -- Geoffrey Wolff, "Newsweek.
"Stunning. I know of no black novel about the South that excludes quite the sam ...More

Black flim-flam man Deke O'Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta's state penitentiary than he's back on the streets working the scam of a lifetime. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement he's counting on the big Harlem rally to produce a big collection--for his own private charity. But the take ($87,000) is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everyone wants to get his hands on. With Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones on everyone's trail and piecing together the complexity of the scheme, Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of Himes's hardest-hitting and most entertaining thrillers. ...More

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination.
It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved.
Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver ...More

This new edition celebrates the 10th anniversary of Walker's Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winner. "If it is true that it is what we run from that chases us, then The Color Purple is the book that ran me down while I sat with my back to it in a field".--from Walker's new preface. ...More

The fortunes of a mulatto girl--as a slave during the Civil War and then as a woman freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. ...More

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