The Anthology. African American literature. Novels and short stories. Poetry. Non-fiction. Essays. I

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands.

Contents:

Novels and short stories

William Wells Brown

CLOTEL; OR, THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER

Frederick Douglass

THE HEROIC SLAVE

Harriet E. Wilson

OUR NIG; OR, SKETCHES FROM THE LIFE OF A FREE BLACK

Nella Larsen

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Charles W. Chesnutt

Paul Laurence Dunbar

THE SCAPEGOAT

Jean Toomer

BECKY

Poetry

Frances E. W. Harper

POEMS

Langston Hughes

THE WEARY BLUES

Countee Cullen

Phillis Wheatley

POEMS  ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL

Non-fiction

Olaudah Equiano

THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO, OR GUSTAVUS VASSA, THE AFRICAN

Mary Prince

THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE, A WEST INDIAN SLAVE

Charles Ball

A NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF CHARLES BALL

Frederick Douglass

NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE

Josiah Henson

THE LIFE OF JOSIAH HENSON

Solomon Northup

TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE

Harriet Ann Jacobs

INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL

Elizabeth Keckley

BEHIND THE SCENES

Louis Hughes

THIRTY YEARS A SLAVE

Booker T. Washington

UP FROM SLAVERY

Henry Box Brown

James Hambleton Christian

Theophilus Collins

Seth Concklin

William And Ellen Craft

Abram Galloway And Richard Eden

Charles Gilbert

Samuel Green

Jamie Griffin

Harry Grimes

James Hamlet And Others

John Henry Hill

Ann Maria Jackson And Her Seven Children

Jane Johnson

Matilda Mahoney

Mary Frances Melvin

Aunt Hannah Moore

Alfred S. Thornton

Essays

W. E. B. Du Bois

THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK

Charles W. Chesnutt

THE DISFRANCHISEMENT OF THE NEGRO

Paul Laurence Dunbar

REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN NEGROES