The inauguration of the country’s first African American president is the latest chapter in the 400-year history of African Americans in North America. One of the best ways to learn about this history is through literature. Here is a reading list highlighting some of the most influential African American authors since the end of World War II:
Ralph Ellison. Ellison’s only completed novel, Invisible Man, won a National Book Award in 1953. An absorbing story of a young man’s struggle for self-definition in the face of the identities imposed on him by both white and black societies, it is also a clever critique of the different ideologies surrounding race in this country.
James Baldwin. Baldwin’s novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Another Country, were profoundly influential, but he was also a fabulous short story writer. A good place to start with Baldwin is with his short-story collection, Going to Meet the Man.
Gwendolyn Brooks. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her second collection of poems, Annie Allen, Brooks is well known for the poems in her mid-1960s collection, We Real Cool.
Alex Haley. Haley won a Pulitzer Price for Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a novel based loosely on his family’s history, starting with the story of Kunta Kinte, kidnapped in Gambia in 1767 and sold as a slave in Maryland. Haley also wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Toni Morrison. As an editor, professor, and writer, this Nobel Prize winner has had a tremendous influence on American literature. Among her best-known works are Song of Solomon and Beloved (winner of a Pulitzer Prize).
August Wilson. His literary legacy is the ten-play series The Pittsburgh Cycle. Each play is set in a different decade, providing an insightful and moving overview of the African American experience in the twentieth century. Two of these plays, The Piano Lesson and Fences, won Pulitzer Prizes.
Read a few of these works, and you’ll be struck by the power by which these authors depict the African American experience. But you’ll also come to see that this experience is part of the heritage that all Americans share, regardless of race.
The inauguration of the country’s first African American president is the latest chapter in the 400-year history of African Americans in North America. One of the best ways to learn about this history is through literature. Here is a reading list highlighting some of the most influential African American authors since the end of World War II: