African American Literature

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  The Pedro Gorino

  Captain Harry Foster Dean’s 1929 memoir The Pedro Gorino is the extraordinary story of his time in southern Africa around the turn of the twentieth…

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  Black in America – Second Edition

  Black in America samples the breadth of nonfiction writing on African American experiences in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. The…

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  Passing

  Written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance (the first sustained artistic movement by African Americans) and of Jim Crow (one of this cultural group’s…

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  Martin R. Delany: Selected Writings

  One of the most powerful and provocative voices to emerge from the social and political unrest preceding the Civil War, the abolitionist and political activist…

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  Frederick Douglass: Selected Writings and Speeches

  Universally recognized today as one of the most important and influential Americans of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass rose to prominence in the national abolitionist…

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  Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives

  Only by Experience: An Anthology of Slave Narratives collects, in whole or in part, sixteen of the most significant and influential slave narratives in English.…

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  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

  In 1861, Harriet Jacobs became the first formerly enslaved African American woman to publish a book-length account of her life. In crafting her coming-of-age story,…

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  Of One Blood

  The Afrofuturist plot of Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–03) weaves together a lost African city, bigamy, incest, murder, ancient prophecies, a thwarted leopard…

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  Hagar’s Daughter

  Hagar’s Daughter is Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s first serial novel, published in the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1901-02). The novel features concealed and mistaken identities, dramatic…

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  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

  Published in the bicentenary year of Frederick Douglass’s birth and in a Black Lives Matter era, this edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick…

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  Iola Leroy

  Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil…

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  A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West

  Mary Ann Shadd’s pamphlet A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West is, as the title promises, a settler guide designed to inform prospective…

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  Clotel

  As nearly all of its reviewers pointed out, Clotel was an audience-minded performance, an effort to capitalize on the post—Uncle Tom’s Cabin “mania” for abolitionist…

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  The Garies and Their Friends

  Unjustly overlooked in its own time, Frank J. Webb’s novel of pre-Civil War Philadelphia weaves together action, humor, and social commentary. The Garies and Their…

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  “We Must Be Up and Doing”

  African American women have been “up and doing” for their communities for as long as they have been in the United States, and their ability…

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  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was a key work of nineteenth-century slave narrative autobiography. Written and published by Equiano, a former…