Literary Criticism

The Messenger was the third most popular magazine of the Harlem Renaissance after The Crisis and Opportunity. Unlike the other two magazines, The Messenger was not tied to a civil rights organization. Labor activist A. Philip Randolph and economist...

Baldwin on race is Baldwin on the white American psyche.... The Cross of Redemption becomes an absorbing portrait of Baldwin's time--and of him. --New York Review of Books   A revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays,...

A landmark anthology of forty poets that brought serious attention to writers such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. The poetry, the prefaces, and Johnson's critical notes have made this book a classic. Indices.

One of the most provocative and original voices in contemporary literature, Chinua Achebe here considers the place of literature and art in our society in a collection of essays spanning his best writing and lectures from the last twenty-three years. For...

The Encyclopedia of Black Comics, focuses on people of African descent who have published significant works in the United States or have worked across various aspects of the comics industry. The book focuses on creators in the field of comics: inkers,...

The first novel by "master of mystery" (The New York Times) Walter Mosley, featuring Easy Rawlins, the most iconic African American detective in all of fiction. Named one of the "best 100 mystery novels of all time" by the Mystery Writers of America,...

This close study of the first six novels of Toni Morrison--The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz--situates her as an African American writer within the American literary tradition who interrogates national identity and...

By the time of her death, at the tragically young age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of...

A collection of private correspondence from one of the Harlem Renaissance's brightest and most radical voices The Jamaican-born, queer author Claude McKay (1890-1948) was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His 1919 poem "If We Must Die"...

An authoritative anthology tracing the history of one of the most important concepts Black people drew on to challenge the brutal, totalizing system of Jim Crow racism This book brings together a wealth of readings on the metaphor of the "New Negro,"...

In Foremother Love, Dana Murphy examines the importance of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley as a foundational figure for Black feminist criticism. Murphy establishes Phillis (as she refers to her) as a writer who wrote in response to and in...

In Foremother Love, Dana Murphy examines the importance of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley as a foundational figure for Black feminist criticism. Murphy establishes Phillis (as she refers to her) as a writer who wrote in response to and in...