Existentialist Thought in African American Literature Before 1940 is the first collection of its kind to break new ground in arguing that long before its classification by Jean-Paul Sartre, African American literature embodied existentialist thought. To make its case, this daring book dissects eight notable texts: Frederick Douglass s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Sojourner Truth s Ain t I A Woman (1861), Harriet Jacobs s Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), Sutton E. Griggs s Imperium in Imperio (1899), James Weldon Johnson...