Fiction
Beloved
Toni Morrison
A mother and daughter reckon with the afterlife of slavery in a house haunted by a child’s return.
Collection
African American Literary Legends
Novels, essays, and poems by writers who reshaped American letters and the language of freedom.
The shelves
Books in this collection
Essays
The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois
Du Bois explores emancipation’s aftermath, segregated education, and the experience he calls double consciousness.
Drama
The Piano Lesson
August Wilson
A carved piano forces siblings to decide what they owe their family’s history and their futures.
Fiction
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
Milkman Dead follows family stories south in a novel about inheritance, naming, and flight.
Fiction
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
Pecola Breedlove’s longing for blue eyes makes a community’s hierarchies painfully visible.
Fiction
Sula
Toni Morrison
Two childhood friends take divergent paths in a hillside Ohio neighborhood.
Fiction
Jazz
Toni Morrison
A Harlem love triangle unfolds through a shifting narrative shaped by musical improvisation.
Fiction
A Mercy
Toni Morrison
Multiple voices illuminate a household in the unsettled world of seventeenth-century colonial America.
Essays
The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin
Two essays examine faith, racial power, and the obligations Americans owe one another.
Fiction
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin
A Harlem teenager’s encounter with the church opens onto the private histories of his family.
Fiction
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin
An American expatriate confronts desire, shame, and his capacity for betrayal in Paris.
Fiction
If Beale Street Could Talk
James Baldwin
Tish and Fonny’s plans for a life together are upended by a wrongful accusation.
Essays
Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin
Baldwin brings personal grief and cultural criticism into conversation across these early essays.
Memoir
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
Angelou revisits a childhood divided among homes, shaped by Southern segregation and the struggle to speak.
Memoir
Mom & Me & Mom
Maya Angelou
Angelou looks back on the complicated reunion and enduring bond with her mother, Vivian Baxter.
Fiction
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford tells the story of three marriages and the hard-won authority to describe her own life.
Oral history
Barracoon
Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston records Cudjo Lewis’s account of captivity, the Atlantic crossing, and life in Africatown.
Folklore
Mules and Men
Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston collects folktales and practices from Florida and New Orleans, listening to the people who keep them alive.
Fiction
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
An unnamed narrator moves through Southern schooling and Harlem politics, questioning who gets to define him.
Fiction
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
Celie’s letters trace a life altered by sisterhood, creativity, and independence.
Essays
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
Alice Walker
Walker locates artistic inheritance in the everyday work and imagination of Black women.
Short stories
The Ways of White Folks
Langston Hughes
Short fiction captures the shifting bargains of race and class across American life.
Poetry
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
An expansive collection follows Hughes across vernacular forms, music, and political imagination.
Memoir
The Big Sea
Langston Hughes
Hughes remembers childhood, travel, and the artists and arguments around the Harlem Renaissance.
Fiction
Quicksand
Nella Larsen
Helga Crane moves between institutions, cities, and countries in search of a place she can inhabit freely.
Fiction
Passing
Nella Larsen
A reunion between two childhood acquaintances unsettles the social boundaries each has learned to navigate.
Fiction
The Street
Ann Petry
Lutie Johnson struggles to build security for herself and her son in wartime Harlem.
Speculative fiction
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler
A Black writer is repeatedly pulled from twentieth-century California to a Maryland plantation.
Speculative fiction
Parable of the Sower
Octavia E. Butler
Lauren Olamina responds to social collapse by developing a belief system and seeking a community.
Speculative fiction
Wild Seed
Octavia E. Butler
Two long-lived figures clash over control, survival, and the meaning of kinship.
Speculative fiction
The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
In a world of recurring geological catastrophe, people who can control the earth face relentless persecution.
Fiction
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward
A Mississippi family road trip brings the living into contact with histories that refuse to stay buried.
Fiction
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
A family in coastal Mississippi prepares for Katrina as a teenage narrator pieces together what it means to care for others.
Memoir
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Douglass describes enslavement, his pursuit of literacy, and his emergence as an abolitionist.
Memoir
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harriet Jacobs
Jacobs recounts exploitation, years spent in hiding, and her efforts to secure freedom for her children.
Essays
All About Love
bell hooks
hooks examines love as a practice that can shape personal relationships and public life.
Fiction
Clotel
William Wells Brown
Brown’s novel follows women navigating slavery and family separation in the early United States.
Memoir
The Heart of a Woman
Maya Angelou
Angelou recalls work in the arts and civil rights organizing while raising her son.
Fiction
Conjure Women
Afia Atakora
A mother and daughter practice healing in a community struggling through the transition from slavery to freedom.
Fiction
The Vanishing Half
Brit Bennett
Twin sisters leave their Southern hometown and build separate lives shaped by different choices about racial identity.
Fiction
The Mothers
Brit Bennett
A Southern California church community looks back on the choices and relationships that bound three young people together.
Drama
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry
A Chicago family debates how to use an inheritance and faces resistance to moving into a new home.
Drama
Fences
August Wilson
A Pittsburgh family negotiates the consequences of one man’s disappointments, decisions, and obligations.
History
The Black Arts Movement
James Edward Smethurst
A study of the Black Arts Movement examines regional networks and the connection between artistic practice and political action.