Arna Bontemps

Total similar authors (36)

• 

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua (part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda). She lives in North Bennington, Vermont (in the United States), during the summers, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Solomon Northup

  Solomon Northup was a free-born African American from Saratoga Springs, New York. He is noted for having been kidnapped in 1841 when enticed with a job offer. When he accompanied his supposed employers to Washington, DC, they drugged him and sold him into slavery. From Washington, DC, he was transported to New Orleans where he was sold to a plantation owner from Rapides Parish, Louisiana. After 12 years in bondage, he regained his freedom in January 1853; he was one of very few to do so in such cases. Held in the Red River region of Louisiana by several different owners, he got news to his family, who contacted friends and enlisted the New York governor in his cause. New York state had passed a law in 1840 to recover African-American reside

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Donald Barthelme

  Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968) apparently collects sometimes surrealistic stories of modern life of American writer Donald Barthelme.
  
  A student at the University of Pennsylvania bore Donald Barthelme. Two years later, in 1933, the family moved to Texas, where father of Barthelme served as a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme later majored in journalism.
  
  In 1951, this still student composed his first articles for the Houston Post. The Army drafted Barthelme, who arrived in Korea on 27 July 1953, the very day, when parties signed the ceasefire, ending the war. He served briefly as the editor of a newspaper of Army before returning to the United States and his job at the Houston Post. Once

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Jean Toomer

  Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. Of mixed race and majority European ancestry, Toomer struggled to identify as "an American" and resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer.
  
  He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
  
  (from Wikipedia)

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Donald Barthelme

  Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968) apparently collects sometimes surrealistic stories of modern life of American writer Donald Barthelme.
  
  A student at the University of Pennsylvania bore Donald Barthelme. Two years later, in 1933, the family moved to Texas, where father of Barthelme served as a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme later majored in journalism.
  
  In 1951, this still student composed his first articles for the Houston Post. The Army drafted Barthelme, who arrived in Korea on 27 July 1953, the very day, when parties signed the ceasefire, ending the war. He served briefly as the editor of a newspaper of Army before returning to the United States and his job at the Houston Post. Once

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Frederick Douglass

  Frederick Douglass (né Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey) was born a slave in the state of Maryland in 1818. After his escape from slavery, Douglass became a renowned abolitionist, editor and feminist. Having escaped from slavery at age 20, he took the name Frederick Douglass for himself and became an advocate of abolition. Douglass traveled widely, and often perilously, to lecture against slavery.
  
  His first of three autobiographies, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, was published in 1845. In 1847 he moved to Rochester, New York, and started working with fellow abolitionist Martin R. Delany to publish a weekly anti-slavery newspaper, North Star. Douglass was the only man to speak in favor of Elizabeth C

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Ambrose Bierce

  died perhaps 1914
  
  Caustic wit and a strong sense of horror mark works, including In the Midst of Life (1891-1892) and The Devil's Dictionary (1906), of American writer Ambrose Gwinett Bierce.
  
  People today best know this editorialist, journalist, and fabulist for his short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and his lexicon.
  
  The informative sardonic view of human nature alongside his vehemence as a critic with his motto, "nothing matters," earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce."
  
  People knew Bierce despite his reputation as a searing critic, however, to encourage younger poet George Sterling and fiction author W.C. Morrow.
  
  Bierce employed a distinctive style especially in his stories. This style often embraces an abrupt begin

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Coleman Hughes

  "My name is Coleman Hughes. I’m a writer, podcast host, and musician.
  
  I’ve written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, the Spectator, and the City Journal. Currently, I’m a contributing writer at the Free Press."

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Harriet Ann Jacobs, usually wrote under the name Harriet Jacobs but also used the pseudonym Linda Brent.
  
  Harriet was born in Edenton, North Carolina to Daniel Jacobs and Delilah. Her father was a mulatto carpenter and slave owned by Dr. Andrew Knox. Her mother was a mulatto slave owned by John Horniblow, a tavern owner. Harriet inherited the status of both her parents as a slave by birth. She was raised by Delilah until the latter died around 1819. She then was raised by her mother's mistress, Margaret Horniblow, who taught her how to sew, read, and write.
  
  In 1823, Margaret Horniblow died, and Harriet was willed to Horniblow's niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, whose father, Dr. James Norcom, became her new master. She and her brother John went to

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  David Walker

  Librarian note:
  There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
  
  David Walker was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well (partus sequitur ventrem). In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge (later named Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Jurisdiction of Massachusetts), he published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and self-help in the fight against the oppressive and unjust slavery. Walker exerted a radicalizing influence on the abolitionist movements of his day and inspired future black leaders and activists.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Henry Louis Gates Jr.

  Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is well-known as a literary critic, an editor of literature, and a proponent of black literature and black cultural studies.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Kate Drumgoold

  Kate Drumgoold was an American woman born into slavery around 1858 near Petersburg, Virginia. Her life is captured in her autobiography, A Slave Girl's Story, Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold. It offers a message of racial uplift, faith, and education. "It is rare portrait of a former slave who moved between the highly urbanized environment of New York City and the rural South."
  
  (from Wikipedia)

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Alain LeRoy Locke

  American educator and writer Alain LeRoy Locke, whose include Four Negro Poets (1927) and Negro Art: Past and Present (1936), championed the Harlem renaissance.
  
  People best remember this philosopher as the chief interpreter. Harvard University in 1907 graduated Locke, a Phi Beta Kappa and the first black Rhodes scholar. He studied at Oxford and the University of Berlin and then received a Philosophiae Doctor in philosophy from Harvard in 1918. Aesthetics strongly concerned this humanist. His philosophy, cultural pluralism, emphasized the determining of values, most especially the respect for the uniqueness of each personality, to guide human conduct and interrelationships.
  
  Locke taught at Howard University in District of Columbia for

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Mary Prince

  Mary Prince (c. 1788-after 1833) was born into slavery in Devonshire Parish, Bermuda. While she was later living in London, her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince (1831), was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom.
  
  Belonging to the genre of slave narratives, this first-hand description of the brutalities of enslavement, released at a time when slavery was still legal in British Caribbean colonies, had a galvanising effect on the anti-slavery movement. It went through three printings in the first year. Prince had her account transcribed while living and working in England at the home of Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. She had gone to London with her master and his fam

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Wallace Thurman

  Wallace Henry Thurman (1902–1934) was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
  
  (from Wikipedia)

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  William L. Andrews

  William Leake Andrews (1948-) is an American Professor Emeritus of English at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a scholar of early African-American literature. Wikipedia

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Solomon Northup

  Solomon Northup was a free-born African American from Saratoga Springs, New York. He is noted for having been kidnapped in 1841 when enticed with a job offer. When he accompanied his supposed employers to Washington, DC, they drugged him and sold him into slavery. From Washington, DC, he was transported to New Orleans where he was sold to a plantation owner from Rapides Parish, Louisiana. After 12 years in bondage, he regained his freedom in January 1853; he was one of very few to do so in such cases. Held in the Red River region of Louisiana by several different owners, he got news to his family, who contacted friends and enlisted the New York governor in his cause. New York state had passed a law in 1840 to recover African-American reside

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Shirley Jackson

  Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson.
  
  She is best known for her dystopian short story, "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received." Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, specul

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  W.E.B. Du Bois

  In 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced 'doo-boyz') was born in Massachusetts. He attended Fisk College in Nashville, then earned his BA in 1890 and his MS in 1891 from Harvard. Du Bois studied at the University of Berlin, then earned his doctorate in history from Harvard in 1894. He taught economics and history at Atlanta University from 1897-1910. The Souls of Black Folk (1903) made his name, in which he urged black Americans to stand up for their educational and economic rights. Du Bois was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and edited the NAACP's official journal, "Crisis," from 1910 to 1934. Du Bois turned "Crisis" into the foremost black literary journal. The black nationalist ex

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Richard Wright

  Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of powerful, sometimes controversial novels, short stories and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerned racial themes. His work helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century.
  
  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Ralph Ellison

  Ralph Ellison was a scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). For The New York Times , the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left after his death.
  
  Ellison died of Pancreatic Cancer on April 16, 1994. He was eighty-one years old.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Ernest Hemingway

  Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Best known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle, and outspoken and blunt public image. Most of Hemingway's works were published between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, including seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works. His writings have become classics of American literature; he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, while three of his novels, four short-story collections and three nonfiction works were published posthumously.
  Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he spent six months as a

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Booker T. Washington

  Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, orator, author and the dominant leader of the African-American community nationwide from the 1890s to his death. Born to slavery and freed by the Civil War in 1865, as a young man, became head of the new Tuskegee Institute, then a teachers' college for blacks. It became his base of operations. His "Atlanta Exposition" speech of 1895 appealed to middle class whites across the South, asking them to give blacks a chance to work and develop separately, while implicitly promising not to demand the vote. White leaders across the North, from politicians to industrialists, from philanthropists to churchmen, enthusiastically supported Washington, as did most middle class blacks. He was the organ

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua (part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda). She lives in North Bennington, Vermont (in the United States), during the summers, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  James Weldon Johnson

  James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore. He was also one of the first African-American professors at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Henry Louis Gates Jr.

  Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is well-known as a literary critic, an editor of literature, and a proponent of black literature and black cultural studies.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Ira Berlin

  A historian of American slavery, Ira Berlin earned his BA in chemistry, and an MA and Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle and Federal City College in Washington, DC before moving to the University of Maryland in 1974, where he was Distinguished University Professor of History. A former president of the Organization of American Historians, Berlin was the founding editor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which he directed until 1991.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Mary Prince

  Mary Prince (c. 1788-after 1833) was born into slavery in Devonshire Parish, Bermuda. While she was later living in London, her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince (1831), was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom.
  
  Belonging to the genre of slave narratives, this first-hand description of the brutalities of enslavement, released at a time when slavery was still legal in British Caribbean colonies, had a galvanising effect on the anti-slavery movement. It went through three printings in the first year. Prince had her account transcribed while living and working in England at the home of Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. She had gone to London with her master and his fam

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  David Levering Lewis

  David Levering Lewis is the Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at New York University.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  William L. Andrews

  William Leake Andrews (1948-) is an American Professor Emeritus of English at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a scholar of early African-American literature. Wikipedia

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Annie L. Burton

  Annie L. Burton (born c. 1858) was an African American memoirist. She was born into slavery on a plantation near Clayton, Alabama. Her date of death is uncertain. Her life's story is captured in her 1909 autobiography Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days. In her autobiography Burton relates that the end of slavery not only signaled a time for African Americans to start a new life, but also a time to redefine their lives. "Burton's Memories details not only one woman's quest from slavery to physical freedom but also her journey from a proscribed role to the creation of own free identity."
  
  (from Wikipedia)

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Alain LeRoy Locke

  American educator and writer Alain LeRoy Locke, whose include Four Negro Poets (1927) and Negro Art: Past and Present (1936), championed the Harlem renaissance.
  
  People best remember this philosopher as the chief interpreter. Harvard University in 1907 graduated Locke, a Phi Beta Kappa and the first black Rhodes scholar. He studied at Oxford and the University of Berlin and then received a Philosophiae Doctor in philosophy from Harvard in 1918. Aesthetics strongly concerned this humanist. His philosophy, cultural pluralism, emphasized the determining of values, most especially the respect for the uniqueness of each personality, to guide human conduct and interrelationships.
  
  Locke taught at Howard University in District of Columbia for

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Kate Drumgoold

  Kate Drumgoold was an American woman born into slavery around 1858 near Petersburg, Virginia. Her life is captured in her autobiography, A Slave Girl's Story, Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold. It offers a message of racial uplift, faith, and education. "It is rare portrait of a former slave who moved between the highly urbanized environment of New York City and the rural South."
  
  (from Wikipedia)

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  David Walker

  Librarian note:
  There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
  
  David Walker was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well (partus sequitur ventrem). In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge (later named Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Jurisdiction of Massachusetts), he published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and self-help in the fight against the oppressive and unjust slavery. Walker exerted a radicalizing influence on the abolitionist movements of his day and inspired future black leaders and activists.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Lucy Ann Delaney

  Lucy Ann Delaney, born Lucy Berry (c. 1830 – after 1891), was an African-American author, former slave, and activist, notable for her 1891 narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom. This is the only first-person account of a "freedom suit" and one of the few post-Emancipation published slave narratives.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Donald Bogle

  Donald Bogle is one of the foremost authorities on Black representation in films and entertainment history. His books include Running Press's Hollywood Black; the groundbreaking Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks; the award-winning Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams; the bestselling Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography; and Brown Sugar, which Bogle adapted into a PBS documentary series. He was a special commentator and consultant for Turner Classic Movies’ award-winning series Race and Hollywood. Bogle teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He lives in Manhattan. — Running Press

  Buy books on Amazon