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.
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Herman Melville
There is more than one author with this name
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Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a mer -
Harriet E. Wilson
Traditionally considered the first female African-American novelist as well as the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig was published in 1859 and rediscovered in 1982.
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The daughter of Joshua Green, an African-American "hooper of barrels", and Margaret Ann (or Adams) Smith, a washerwoman of Irish ancestry. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother abandoned her at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr., a well-to-do Milford farmer. As an orphan, Adams was made an indentured servant to the Hayward family, a customary way for society to arrange support at the time. In exchange for her labor, the child would receive room, board and training in life skills, or that was -
Zora Neale Hurston
Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
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In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern t -
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
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Elaine Brown
Elaine Brown (born March 2, 1943) is an American prison activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairman who is based in Oakland, California. Brown briefly ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2008. She currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is a founder of Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice.
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When Newton fled to Cuba in 1974 in the face of murder charges, he appointed Brown to lead the Party. The first woman to do so, Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 until 1977. In her 1992 memoir A Taste of Power, she wrote about the experience:
"A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, -
Nathanael West
Born Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein to prosperous Jewish parents, from the first West set about creating his own legend, and anglicising his name was part of that process. At Brown University in Rhode Island, he befriended writer and humourist S. J. Perelman (who later married his sister), and started writing and drawing cartoons. As his cousin Nathan Wallenstein also attended Brown, West took to borrowing his work and presenting it as his own. He almost didn't graduate at all, on account of failing a crucial course in modern drama. West indulged in a little dramatics of his own and, in tearful contrition, convinced a gullible professor to upgrade his marks.
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After spending a couple of years in Paris, where he wrote his first novel, The -
Richard Powers
Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His book The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.
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Alondra Nelson
Alondra Nelson is professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she has served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science and director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Before arriving at Columbia, she was on the faculty of Yale University and received the Poorvu Award for interdisciplinary teaching excellence.
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She is the author or editor of four books, including Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, for which she was recognized with the Mirra Komarovsky award as well as several other prizes. Her most recent book is The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome. She is also an editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past The Collisio -
Alice Walker
Noted American writer Alice Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for her stance against racism and sexism in such novels as The Color Purple (1982).
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People awarded this preeminent author of stories, essays, and poetry of the United States. In 1983, this first African woman for fiction also received the national book award. Her other books include The Third Life of Grange Copeland , Meridian , The Temple of My Familiar , and Possessing the Secret of Joy . In public life, Walker worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. -
Elizabeth Nunez
Elizabeth Nunez was a Trinidadian-American novelist academic who was a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College, New York City.
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Her novels have won a number of awards: Prospero's Daughter received The New York Times Editors' Choice and 2006 Novel of the Year from Black Issues Book Review, Bruised Hibiscus won the 2001 American Book Award, and Beyond the Limbo Silence won the 1999 Independent Publishers Book Award. In addition, Nunez was shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Discretion; Boundaries was selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice and nominated for a 2012 NAACP Image Award; and Anna In-Between was selected for the 2010 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for literary excellence as well as a New York Time -
William Julius Wilson
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
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Jessie Redmon Fauset
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an American editor, poet, essayist and novelist.
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Fauset was born in Fredericksville, an all-black hamlet in Camden County, New Jersey, also known as Free Haven (now incorporated into the borough of Lawnside, New Jersey). She was the daughter of Anna "Annie" Seamon and Redmon Fauset, a Presbyterian minister. Her mother died when she was still a young girl. Her father remarried Bella Huff (a white woman), and they had three children, including civil rights activist and folklorist Arthur Fauset (1899–1983).
Fauset attended Philadelphia High School for girls, and graduated as the only African American in her class. After high school Fauset graduated from Cornell University in 1905, and is believed to be the second black w -
Robert Gordon
Robert Gordon (b. 1961) is an American writer and filmmaker from Memphis, Tennessee. His work has focused on the American south—its music, art, and politics—to create an insider's portrait of his home, both nuanced and ribald.
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Alan Young
Alan Young gained a PhD from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1974, on the political role of the Comyns in Medieval Scotland and continues to be fascinated by the family. He has written biographies of William Wallace and Robert Bruce and is a freelance writer and lecturer.
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George S. Schuyler
(1895–1977), satirist, critic, and journalist. George Samuel Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Eliza Jane Fischer and George S. Schuyler. He grew up in a middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood in Syracuse, New York, where he attended public schools until he enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen. He spent seven years (1912–1919) with the black 25th U.S. Infantry and was discharged as a first lieutenant.
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From early on, Schuyler possessed a high level of confidence and boasted of his family having been free as far back as the Revolutionary War. In 1921, Schuyler joined the Socialist Party of America, through which he connected with A. Philip Randolph, who hired him in 1923 as assistant editor for the Messenger; in that -
William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer. His novel Clotel (1853) is considered the first novel written by an African American; it was published in London, where he was living at the time. Brown was a pioneer in several different literary genres, including travel writing, fiction, and drama. He has a school named after him in Lexington, Kentucky and was among the first writers inducted to the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
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Lecturing in England when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the US, which required people in -
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906) was a seminal American poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dunbar gained national recognition for his 1896 Lyrics of a Lowly Life, one poem in the collection Ode to Ethiopia. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Paul Laurence Dunbar on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
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Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had escaped from slavery; his father was a veteran of the American Civil War, having served in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry Regiment. His parents instilled in him a love of learning and history. He was a student at an all-white high school, Dayton Central High School, and he participated activel -
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.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. -
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". He has been called "a giant of American letters."
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During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward F. Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American -
Jack London
John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.
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London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of animal rights, workers’ rights and socialism. London wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, War of the Classes, and Before Adam.
His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and Wh -
Mark Twain
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. -
Walt Whitman
Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
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Whitman was born in Huntington on Long Island, and lived in Brooklyn as a child and through much of his career. At the age of 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman's major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was financed with hi -
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff is a writer of fiction and nonfiction.
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He is best known for his short stories and his memoirs, although he has written two novels.
Wolff is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, where he has taught classes in English and creative writing since 1997. He also served as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford from 2000 to 2002. -
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.
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Ellison died of Pancreatic Cancer on April 16, 1994. He was eighty-one years old. -
Nella Larsen
Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen (first called Nellie Walker) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote two novels and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, what she wrote earned her recognition by her contemporaries and by present-day critics.
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O. Henry
Such volumes as Cabbages and Kings (1904) and The Four Million (1906) collect short stories, noted for their often surprising endings, of American writer William Sydney Porter, who used the pen name O. Henry.
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His biography shows where he found inspiration for his characters. His era produced their voices and his language.
Mother of three-year-old Porter died from tuberculosis. He left school at fifteen years of age and worked for five years in drugstore of his uncle and then for two years at a Texas sheep ranch.
In 1884, he went to Austin, where he worked in a real estate office and a church choir and spent four years as a draftsman in the general land office. His wife and firstborn died, but daughter Margaret survived him.
He failed -
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914, and the second with Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946. Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein cultivated significant tertiary relationships with well-known members of the avant garde artistic and literary world of her time.
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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.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. -
James Baldwin
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Works of American writer James Arthur Baldwin, outspoken critic of racism, include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel, and Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays.
James Arthur Baldwin authored plays and poems in society.
He came as the eldest of nine children; his stepfather served as a minister. At 14 years of age in 1938, Baldwin preached at the small fireside Pentecostal church in Harlem. From religion in the early 1940s, he transferred his faith to literature with the still evident impassioned cadences of black churches. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France -
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.
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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 -
Ambrose Bierce
died perhaps 1914
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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 -
Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American novelist, poet and journalist, best known for the novel, The Red Badge of Courage. That work introduced the reading world to Crane's striking prose, a mix of impressionism, naturalism and symbolism. He died at age 28 in Badenweiler, Baden, Germany.
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Washington Irving
People remember American writer Washington Irving for the stories " Rip Van Winkle " and " The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ," contained in The Sketch Book (1820).
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This author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century wrote newspaper articles under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle to begin his literary career at the age of nineteen years.
In 1809, he published The History of New York under his most popular public persona, Diedrich Knickerbocker.
Historical works of Irving include a five volume biography of George Washington (after whom he was named) as well as biographies of Oliver Goldsmith, Muhammad, and several histories, dealing with subjects, such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra, of 15th-ce -
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.
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Claude McKay
Jamaican-born American writer Claude McKay figured prominently in the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s; his works include collections of poetry, such as Constab Ballads (1912), and novels, including Home to Harlem (1928).
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Home to Harlem, a best-seller, won Festus Claudius McKay, a poet and a seminal figure, the Harmon gold award for literature.
He also wrote novels Banjo and Banana Bottom . People not yet published his manuscript, called Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem , of 1941.
McKay also authored collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, Gingertown . He authored two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green H -
Elizabeth Bishop
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century. -
William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer. His novel Clotel (1853) is considered the first novel written by an African American; it was published in London, where he was living at the time. Brown was a pioneer in several different literary genres, including travel writing, fiction, and drama. He has a school named after him in Lexington, Kentucky and was among the first writers inducted to the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
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Lecturing in England when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the US, which required people in -
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.
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Susan Glaspell
Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 – July 27, 1948) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actress, director, novelist, biographer and poet. She was a founding member of the Provincetown Players, one of the most important collaboratives in the development of modern drama in the United States. She also served in the Works Progress Administration as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project.
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Her novels and plays are committed to developing deep, sympathetic characters, to understanding 'life' in its complexity. Though realism was the medium of her fiction, she was also greatly interested in philosophy and religion. Many of her characters make principled stands.
As part of the Provincetown Players, she arranged for the -
George S. Schuyler
(1895–1977), satirist, critic, and journalist. George Samuel Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Eliza Jane Fischer and George S. Schuyler. He grew up in a middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood in Syracuse, New York, where he attended public schools until he enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen. He spent seven years (1912–1919) with the black 25th U.S. Infantry and was discharged as a first lieutenant.
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From early on, Schuyler possessed a high level of confidence and boasted of his family having been free as far back as the Revolutionary War. In 1921, Schuyler joined the Socialist Party of America, through which he connected with A. Philip Randolph, who hired him in 1923 as assistant editor for the Messenger; in that -
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.
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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 -
J.F. Powers
James Farl Powers was an American novelist and short-story writer who often drew his inspiration from developments in the Catholic Church, and was known for his studies of Catholic priests in the Midwest. Although not a priest himself, he is known for having captured a "clerical idiom" in postwar North America.
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Powers was a conscientious objector during World War II, and went to prison for it. Later he worked as a hospital orderly. His first writing experiment began as a spiritual exercise during a religious retreat. His work has long been admired for its gentle satire and its astonishing ability to recreate with a few words the insular but gradually changing world of post-WWII American Catholicism. Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O'Connor, and Walke -
David Walker
Librarian note:
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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. -
Edgar Allan Poe
The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
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Just as the bizarre c -
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859 – August 13, 1930) was a prominent African-American novelist, journalist, playwright, historian, and editor. She is considered a pioneer in her use of the romantic novel to explore social and racial themes. Her work reflects the influence of W. E. B. Du Bois.
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She also wrote under the pseudonym Sarah A. Allen. -
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859 – August 13, 1930) was a prominent African-American novelist, journalist, playwright, historian, and editor. She is considered a pioneer in her use of the romantic novel to explore social and racial themes. Her work reflects the influence of W. E. B. Du Bois.
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She also wrote under the pseudonym Sarah A. Allen. -
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.
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(from Wikipedia) -
Claude McKay
Jamaican-born American writer Claude McKay figured prominently in the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s; his works include collections of poetry, such as Constab Ballads (1912), and novels, including Home to Harlem (1928).
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Home to Harlem, a best-seller, won Festus Claudius McKay, a poet and a seminal figure, the Harmon gold award for literature.
He also wrote novels Banjo and Banana Bottom . People not yet published his manuscript, called Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem , of 1941.
McKay also authored collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, Gingertown . He authored two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green H -
Chester Himes
Chester Bomar Himes began writing in the early 1930s while serving a prison sentence for armed robbery. From there, he produced short stories for periodicals such as Esquire and Abbott's Monthly. When released, he focussed on semi-autobiographical protest novels.
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In 1953, Himes emigrated to France, where he was approached by Marcel Duhamel of Gallimard to write a detective series for Série Noire, which had published works from the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson. Himes would be the first black author included in the series. The resulting Harlem Cycle gained him celebrity when he won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for La Reine des Pommes (now known in English as A Rage in Harlem) in 1958. Three of t -
Arna Bontemps
Works of poetry, history, and fiction, such as God Sends Sunday (1931) and Black Thunder (1936), established American writer Arna Wendell Bontemps as a leading figure of the renaissance of Harlem.
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People note Arnaud Wendell Bontemps, an African novelist and librarian, as a member.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arna_Bo... -
Dorothy West
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Dorothy West was a novelist and short story writer who was part of the Harlem Renaissance. She is best known for her novel The Living Is Easy, about the life of an upper-class black family.
West's principal contribution to the Harlem Renaissance was to publish the magazine Challenge, which she founded in 1934 with $40. She also published the magazines successor, New Challenge. These magazines were among the first to publish literature featuring realistic portrayals of African Americans. Among the works published were Richard Wright's groundbreaking essay "Blueprint for Negro Writing," together with writings by Margare -
Rosamond Lehmann
Rosamond Nina Lehmann was born in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, as the second daughter of Rudolph Lehmann and his wife Alice Davis, a New Englander. Her father Rudolph Chambers Lehmann was a liberal MP, and editor of the Daily News. John Lehmann (1907-1989) was her brother; one of her two sisters was the famous actress Beatrix Lehmann.
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In 1919 she went to Girton College, University of Cambridge to read English Literature, an unusual thing for a woman to do at that time. In December 1923 she married Leslie Runciman (later 2nd Viscount Runciman of Doxford) (1900-1989), and the couple went to live in Newcastle upon Tyne. It was an unhappy marriage, and they separated in 1927 and were divorced later that year.
In 1927, Lehmann published her first -
Tyehimba Jess
Tyehimba Jess is the author of leadbelly and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Olio. leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2005." Jess's second book, Olio, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 2017 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the 2017 Book Award for Poetry from the Society of Midland Authors. It was also a finalist for the 2016 National Books Critics Circle Award, 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Library Journal called it a "daring collection, which blends forthright, musically acute language with portraiture" and Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it "Encyclopedic,
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Nella Larsen
Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen (first called Nellie Walker) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote two novels and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, what she wrote earned her recognition by her contemporaries and by present-day critics.
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Sonia Sanchez
Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama. After her mother died in childbirth a year later, Sanchez lived with her paternal grandmother and other relatives for several years. In 1943, she moved to Harlem with her sister to live with their father and his third wife.
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She earned a B.A. in political science from Hunter College in 1955. She also did postgraduate work at New York University and studied poetry with Louise Bogan. Sanchez formed a writers' workshop in Greenwich Village, attended by such poets as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), and Larry Neal. Along with Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight, she formed the "Broadside Quartet" of young poets, intr -
Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist, best known for her novel, The Piano Teacher.
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She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." -
Marsha Hunter
Legal communication coach Marsha Hunter teaches persuasion for trial lawyers and public speaking for corporate attorneys. She works exclusively with lawyers. Her specialty is human factors—the science of human performance in high-stakes environments. Hunter's expertise in cognition and communication focuses on how people think, speak, feel, and act in dynamic situations. Her teaching is both technical and practical, drawing on techniques from sports psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science.
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Three times each year, Hunter is the program director for The Articulate Advocate: Becoming More Fluent on Your Feet, a two-day intensive courtroom communication skills program, at NITA's National Education Center in Boulder, Colorado. Ms. Hunter is -
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.
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Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Annie Allen and one of the most celebrated Black poets. She also served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress—the first Black woman to hold that position. She was the poet laureate for the state of Illinois for over thirty years, a National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her works include We Are Shining, Bronzeville Boys and Girls, A Street in Bronzeville, In the Mecca, The Bean Eaters, and Maud Martha.
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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.
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Ellison died of Pancreatic Cancer on April 16, 1994. He was eighty-one years old. -
Hannah Crafts
Hannah Bond, pen name Hannah Crafts (b.ca.1830s), was an African-American writer who escaped from slavery in North Carolina about 1857 and went to the North. Bond settled in New Jersey, likely married Thomas Vincent, and became a teacher. She wrote The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts after gaining freedom, which may be the first novel by an African-American woman. It is the only known one by a fugitive slave woman.
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Apparently written in the late 1850s, the novel was published in 2002 for the first time after Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard University professor of African-American literature and history, purchased the manuscript and had it authenticated. [I]t rapidly became a bestseller.
Bond's identity was documented in 2013 by Gregg -
Asa G. Hilliard III
Asa Grant Hilliard III (August 22, 1933 – August 13, 2007) was an African-American professor of educational psychology who worked on indigenous ancient African history (ancient Egyptian), culture, education and society. He was the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and the Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education.
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Tiffany Lethabo King
Tiffany Lethabo King is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University.
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Bobby Seale
Robert George Seale is an American political activist. Seale is widely known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with fellow activist Huey P. Newton.
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Eldridge Cleaver
Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, better known as Eldridge Cleaver, was a writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party.
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In 1958 he was put in jail for rape. There he was given a copy of The Communist Manifesto. When he got released he joined the Black Panther Party. He then joined the Oakland-based Black Panther Party, serving as Minister of Information, or spokesperson.
His book Soul On Ice is a collection of essays. In the most controversial part of the book, Cleaver acknowledges committing acts of rape, stating that he initially raped black women in the ghetto "for practice" and then embarked on the serial rape of white women. He described these crimes as politically inspired.
Later in life he converted to Morm -
Amiri Baraka
Poems and plays, such as Dutchman (1964), of American writer Amiri Baraka originally Everett LeRoi Jones focus on racial conflict.
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He attended Barringer high school. Coyt Leverette Jones, his father, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. Anna Lois Russ Jones, his mother, worked as a social worker.
He studied at Rutgers, Columbia, and Howard universities but left without a degree and attended the new school for social research. He won a scholarship to Rutgers in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard. He studied philosophy and religion, major fields. Jones also served three years in the air force as a gunner. Jones continued his studies of comparative literature at Colum -
Fred Chappell
Fred Davis Chappell retired after 40 years as an English professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was the Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 1997-2002. He attended Duke University.
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His 1968 novel Dagon, which was named the Best Foreign Book of the Year by the Academie Française, is a recasting of a Cthulhu Mythos horror story as a psychologically realistic Southern Gothic.
His literary awards include the Prix de Meilleur des Livres Etrangers, the Bollingen Prize, and the T. S. Eliot Prize. -
Mary-Frances Winters
Mary-Frances Winters is the founder and president of The Winters Group, Inc., a 36-year old global diversity, equity and inclusion consulting firm. She is a passionate advocate for justice and equity; a provocateur not afraid to have the difficult conversations. Mary-Frances has over three decades of experience working with corporate leaders in support of enhancing their understanding of what it is like to be the “other.”
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Ms. Winters is a master strategist with experience in strategic planning, change management, diversity, organization development, training and facilitation, systems thinking and qualitative and quantitative research methods. She has extensive experience in working with senior leadership teams to drive organizational change -
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.
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Sutton Elbert Griggs
Sutton Elbert Griggs was an African-American author, Baptist minister, and social activist. He is best known for Imperium in Imperio, a utopian work that envisions a separate African-American state within the United States.
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Tillie Olsen
Tillie Lerner Olsen (January 14, 1912 – January 1, 2007) was an American writer associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists.
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Though she published little, Olsen was very influential for her treatment of the lives of women and the poor. She drew attention to why women have been less likely to be published authors (and why they receive less attention than male authors when they do publish). Her work received recognition in the years of much feminist political and social activity. It contributed to new possibilities for women writers. Olsen's influence on American feminist fiction has caused some critics to be frustrated at simplistic feminist interpretations of her work. In particular, sever -
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.
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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 -
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.
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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 -
David Walker
Librarian note:
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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. -
John Bowe
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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John Bowe (born 1964) has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The American Prospect, National Public Radios This American Life, McSweeneys, and others. He is the co-editor of Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, one of Harvard Business Reviews best books of 2000, and co-screenwriter of the film Basquiat. In 2004, he received the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the Sydney Hillman Award for journalists, writers, and public figures who pursue social justice and public policy for the common good, and the Richard J. Margolis Award, dedicated to journalism that combines social concern and humor. -
Martin R. Delany
Martin Robinson Delany was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, physician, soldier, writer and proponent of black nationalism. Delany was born in Charles Town, Virginia and raised and in Chambersburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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In 1850, Delany was among the first three black students admitted to Harvard Medical School, from which they were dismissed weeks after their admission due to student protests. Delany traveled throughout the South in 1839 to observe slavery there, and in 1847 started working with Frederick Douglass to publish North Star, an anti-slavery newspaper.
At the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, Delany returned to the United States after living in Canada and visiting Liberia. By 1863, Delany was recruiti -
H.T. Tsiang
Poet, playwright, and novelist. Hsi Tseng Tsiang (H. T. Tsiang) was born in China in 1899 and came to America as a child. He was involved with the Greenwich Village literary scene in the 1920s and 1930s, and self-published a number of books which he would hawk at downtown political meetings. Tsiang also appeared as an actor in Hollywood, most notably in the film Tokyo Rose. He died in 1971 in Los Angeles, CA.
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Henry Dumas
In April of 1968, at the age of thirty-three, Henry Dumas was shot and killed by a New York Transit Authority Policeman at 125th Street Station in a case of "mistaken identity." At the time of his death, he had already finished several manuscripts of poetry and short stories.
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Dumas' poetry, short fiction, and novels have been published posthumously in large part due to the efforts of Eugene Redmond, Toni Morrison, and Quincy Troupe. Poetry for My People first appeared in 1970 and was later published as Play Ebony, Play Ivory. When Play Ebony, Play Ivory appeared in 1974, Julius Lester in the New York Times Book Review called Dumas "the most original Afro-American poet of the sixties." Dumas' first collection of short fiction, Arks of Bones -
Abraham Cahan
Abraham "Abe" Cahan was a Lithuanian-born Jewish-American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician.
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Source: Wikipedia. -
Daphne Marlatt
"Nationality: Canadian (originally Maylasian, immigrated to Canada in 1951). Born: Daphne Shirley Buckle, Melbourne, Australia, 1942.
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Education: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1960-64, B.A.; University of Indiana, Bloomington, 1964-67, M.A. 1968. Career: Has taught at University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, University of Saskatchewan, University of Western Ontario, Simon Fraser University, University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, University of Alberta, McMaster University, University of Manitoba; second vice chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, 1987-88.
Awards: MacMillan and Brissenden award for creative writing; Canada Council award. Member: Founding member of West Coast Women and Words Society.
Other Work: -
Sarah Rose Nordgren
Sarah Rose Nordgren is the author of four books of poetry and prose, including Best Bones (University of Pittsburgh, 2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Darwin’s Mother (University of Pittsburgh, 2017), and the hybrid-genre chapbook, The Creation Museum (Harbor Editions, 2022). Nordgren’s first work of nonfiction, Feathers: A Bird Hat Wearer’s Journal, is forthcoming in February 2024 from Essay Press. Winner of the Essay Press Book Prize, the volume was called “a one-of-a-kind book that raises great insights into flesh and forms of theory and poetry” by judge Ronaldo Wilson.
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Sarah Rose lives in her hometown of Durham, North Carolina. She is the Founding Director of The School for Living Futures, an experimental, interdis -
Sheena C. Howard
Writer of fiction, non-fiction, film, comics and graphic novels | Howard University Alum | Eisner Award winner | Featured in Emmy nominated episode of State of the Arts | Appearances on BCC, ABC, PBS and more | All types of stories deserve to be told, and I'm here to tell them | Growth happens when you listen to the stories that make you uncomfortable and consume things that challenge what you think you know.
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