This casebook gathers together the most important critical responses to Richard Wright's autobiography. It includes a 1945 interview with Richard Wright, contemporary reviews of Black Boy written by W.E.B. Du Bois, Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison, and eight critical essays. These essays address a range of topics including the circumstances of the book's original publication in 1945; the relationship between the novel and Wright's actual biography; the African-American autobiographical tradition; the influences of various writers and literary movements on Black...

In 1865, The Christian Recorder, the national newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serialized The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, a novel written by Mrs. Julia C. Collins, an African American woman living in the small town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The first novel ever published by a black American woman, it is set in antebellum Louisiana and Connecticut, and focuses on the lives of a beautiful mixed-race mother and daughter whose opportunities for fulfillment through love and marriage are threatened by slavery and caste prejudice. The text shares much with popular...

In this memoir, West Indian poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite conjures his wife, Doris, and tells of her death from cancer.

The autobiographies of former slaves contributed powerfully to the abolitionist movement in the United States, fanning national--even international--indignation against the evils of slavery. The four texts gathered here are all from North Carolina slaves and are among the most memorable and influential slave narratives published in the nineteenth century. The writings of Moses Roper (1838), Lunsford Lane (1842), Moses Grandy (1843), and the Reverend Thomas H. Jones (1854) provide a moving testament to the struggles of enslaved people to affirm their human dignity and ultimately seize their...

"The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" (1912), James Weldon Johnsons first book and the first modernist novel written by an African American, is a groundbreaking and subtle account of racial passing, initially published as an anonymous memoir. Its veracitymany believed it to be a genuine autobiographyhas made it one of the undisputed masterpieces of African American literature and established Johnson in the African American literary vanguard of the first half of the twentieth century. He was also one of the central figures of the civil-rights struggle of his era, a tireless activist and...

A collection from one of our most influential African American writers
An icon of nineteenth-century American fiction, Charles W. Chesnutt, an incisive storyteller of the aftermath of slavery in the South, is widely credited with almost single-handedly inaugurating the African American short story tradition and was the first African American novelist to achieve national critical acclaim. This major addition to Penguin Classics features an ideal sampling of his work: twelve short stories (including conjure tales and protest fiction), three essays, and the novel "The Marrow of Tradition."...

A far cry from the nineteenth-century slave narrative tradition, this book, written in 1857, is a special kind of success story. With delightful urbanity and wit, Mary Seacole, a free-born Jamaican Creole, recounts her childhood as a daughter of a Scottish army officer and a free black boarding-house keeper, her years as a storekeeper in a Central American frontier town, and her role as a battlefield 'doctress' to British troops in the Crimean War. She emerges as an independent and respected maternal figure, the acme of female achievement in Victorian culture, and a symbol of 'home' to...

The book contains the biography of an American bondman William Wells Brown, which was written by his daughter Josephine Brown. It also presents the precedent-setting biography of Martin R. Delany, which helped to introduce an analytical approach to biography writing in African-American letters. An unabashed success story of one man's military career during the Civil War and his subsequent work in the Freedman's Bureau during Reconstruction, this book, written at a crucial juncture in American history, creates a vivid portrait of a man who comes to represent the voice of national union,...

Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave is the first fugitive slave narrative in American history. Because Grimes wrote and published his narrative on his own, without deference to white editors, publishers, or sponsors, his Life has an immediacy, candor, and no-holds-barred realism unparalleled in the famous antebellum slave narratives of the period. This edition of Grimes's autobiography represents a historic partnership between noted scholar of the African American slave narrative, William L. Andrews, and Regina Mason, Grimes's great-great-great-granddaughter. Their...