African American literature is literature written by Black Americans of African descent. Its themes include the exploration of Black identity, the diversity of the Black experience, and the condemnation of racism. African American literature also celebrates the unique aspects of African American culture from folklore to religion and music.
Early works.
The earliest surviving works of African American literature date from the mid-1700’s. They were written by Africans who had been enslaved and brought to America. The oldest known example is “Bars Fight,” a poem about a raid by Indigenous (native) people on a Massachusetts town. Lucy Terry, a 16-year-old enslaved woman living in New England, composed the poem in 1746. It was handed down orally before its publication in 1855. In the late 1700’s, Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who lived in Boston, became the first important Black poet. Her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published in London in 1773, is the first published book by an African American.
The 1800’s.
The oral tradition of fables, notably trickster tales, played a vital part in early African American culture. Trickster tales often involved a clever character outwitting a stronger adversary, as in the famous stories about the trickster Brer Rabbit. The stories were a significant form of entertainment for enslaved people and a way of indirectly discussing the institution of slavery.
Before the American Civil War (1861-1865), many Black writers were people who had escaped from slavery. Their texts described their experiences on plantations—including frequent beatings, harsh labor, and the separation of family members—in an attempt to persuade white readers that slavery was immoral and therefore should be abolished. Additionally, the texts showed the courage, humanity, and intelligence of people of African descent. The most important such autobiography of this period is the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Douglass became the leading spokesman for Black Americans in the 1800’s. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), by Harriet Ann Jacobs, is rare among pre-Civil War autobiographical accounts, because it focuses on the unique hardships suffered by enslaved Black women.
Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup (1853) demonstrates how vulnerable all African Americans, enslaved or free, were at this time. Northup recounts being sold into slavery despite his status as a free man. Ellen and William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860) challenges the assumed boundaries between Blackness and whiteness. Ellen disguised herself as a white slave master and her husband, William, as her slave in order to escape to freedom.
Some lesser known texts, including The Bondwoman’s Narrative (written about 1853-1860, first published in 2002), have been recently discovered and published. Historians believe the writer of this handwritten document was Hannah Bond, who used the pen name Hannah Crafts to hide her identity. Evidence suggests that she began writing it while still enslaved and finished after she escaped to freedom in about 1857.
Spiritual narratives that combined autobiography with religious or philosophical beliefs were also popular. Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1832, expanded edition 1879) is one example. Maria Stewart was a free Black woman living in Massachusetts and a speaker on women’s rights. A speech she gave in 1832 is the first known public speech on politics given by an American woman to an audience of both men and women. This period also saw the publication of the nation’s first African American-owned newspaper, Freedom’s Journal (1827 to 1829).
The first published African American fiction appeared in the mid-1800’s. This fiction included such novels about slavery as Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853), by William Wells Brown, who had escaped from slavery himself; and Our Nig (1859), by Harriet E. Wilson, the first African American woman to publish a novel. Frances E. W. Harper’s “The Two Offers” (1859) is the earliest published short story by an African American. Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) is a novel that describes the problems of a free family living in the North. Blake (1861-1862) by Martin Robison Delany tells about a free Black man who organizes a slave rebellion.
After slavery was abolished
in 1865, African American authors wrote in many literary forms to protest race discrimination. In the 1890’s and early 1900’s, Paul Laurence Dunbar was acclaimed for his romantic poems in Black dialect. However, some of his verses express bitter social criticism. Charles Waddell Chesnutt portrayed formerly enslaved persons as intelligent and resourceful in his realistic short stories and novels. One of his better-known works is The Conjure Woman (1899). This collection of short stories draws in part on the trickster tradition. However, it also shows how impossible it was for African Americans to hold their families together under slavery.
Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline Hopkins were leading Black women writers. They challenged both racism and sexism in their novels and other works.
In the early 1900’s,
African American writers questioned how to produce art that told creative stories but also addressed issues of racial injustice after slavery. In Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901), he opposes efforts to protest racism. Instead, he champions a pacifist approach, in which skilled trade labor is key to resolving inequality. This stance indirectly placed Washington in opposition to Douglass and to a number of contemporaries, including W. E. B. Du Bois. In 1910, Du Bois helped to establish The Crisis, which became one of the leading Black-owned magazines of the early 1900’s. The Crisis addressed social and political issues concerning African Americans and became a platform for upcoming artists and writers. In his essay collection The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois showcases his background in sociology and his primary argument that intellectualism and the arts have pivotal roles in securing greater equality. 
Du Bois became a leader among the Black intellectuals who believed that Black artists should create for political purposes, with the goal of racial equality as their top priority. A second group, including the educator and writer Alain Locke, thought that artistic creativity should not be limited by pressure to create only positive images of Black life. This debate shaped many of the Black literary works of the 1900’s.
The Harlem Renaissance.
African American ethnic pride and creativity flourished during the 1920’s. The period’s exceptional outpouring of Black literature came to be called the Harlem Renaissance because it began in Harlem, a district of New York City.
In the 1910’s and 1920’s, many African Americans moved to Harlem and other urban areas in the North. They hoped to find higher-paying industrial jobs and to escape the more violent and overt racism in the South. This mass exodus from the South came to be called the Great Migration. Alain Locke theorized that African Americans were not only changing their location, but also experiencing a drastic change in identity. He referred to this new identity as the New Negro. The New Negro became a popular term to describe the dramatic transformation from imitating old rural Southern stereotypes of Blackness to possessing a modern, urban identity grounded in racial pride and greater self-understanding.
Writers portrayed the idea of the New Negro in literature that reflected the social, cultural, and geographical variation of Black American experiences. Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) and Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues (1926) blend artistic genres (categories) by combining poetry, prose, and music to illustrate the struggles of working class Black people across the country. Toomer and Hughes draw stark contrasts between the tradition-bound South and the fast-paced, urban North. They envision the North as the ultimate place of refuge for African Americans.
Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) shows how deeply embedded racism is in the nation’s core institutions. McKay also reveals a much more complicated attitude towards the North, as a corrupt place but also as a means of escape for African Americans. Some other important writers of the Harlem Renaissance include Sterling A. Brown, James Weldon Johnson, and Countee Cullen.
Women writers explored feminism and the journey that African American women endured to find their own artistic voice in such works as Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928). Nella Larsen’s novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) portray urban Black women’s determination to achieve social and economic advancement at any cost. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) continues the conversation about Black women’s autonomy by suggesting that fulfillment does not exist in the traditional institution of marriage.
The mid-1900’s and Naturalism.
In the mid-1900’s, much African American literature departed from the themes of the Harlem Renaissance by exposing the bleak conditions of Black life during and after the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Writers also condemned discrimination against the poor of all races. As part of a literary movement called Naturalism, many writers created characters whose actions were fully determined by the characters’ heredity or environment. They demonstrated the many ways that racism and sexism hindered African Americans’ free will to pursue their dreams and passions.
Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) both describe Black men’s quests for identity in a hostile country. James Baldwin explored related themes of identity and isolation in novels, essays, and dramas. His semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) follows a young Black man struggling to navigate the worlds of a repressive Black church and of the city with all of its temptations and oppression.
In 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Annie Allen (1949). Her novel Maud Martha (1953) details how exceptionally difficult adolescence is for Black girls, who lack ways to express themselves or challenge their abilities. Like many Black writers of the mid-1900’s, Brooks examined the impact of race, alienation, and poverty on the African American’s pursuit of the American dream. Lorraine Hansberry also explored these issues in A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway.
Black Pride and the arts.
During the 1960’s and 1970’s, many African American writers gave up the hope of an integrated society and began to echo the call of the Black Pride Movement for a separate Black culture. The movement stressed the importance of Black nationalism and of independence from white mainstream media. For many writers, activism and art inspired each other. They saw art as a way to encourage racial pride and heighten social awareness and liberation in their Black audience.
Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) was a founder of the Black Arts Movement. His one-act play, Dutchman (1964), is a conversation between a well-to-do Black man and a white woman on a subway train. Despite the play’s seeming simplicity, Dutchman explores the contradictions of Black-white race relations. It also portrays the identity crisis faced by Black men who strive for excellence, and as a result, are questioned about their loyalty to their racial identity.
The writers of the Black Arts Movement rejected traditional literary techniques and themes and developed their own forms of self-expression. Prominent authors included Ed Bullins, Etheridge Knight, Haki Madhubuti (born Don L. Lee), and Douglas Turner Ward.
Male voices dominated the movement, and many works presented masculinity as a solution to the generations-long degradation of African Americans. Nevertheless, strong female voices also emerged, including Jayne Cortez, Nikki Giovanni, Carolyn Rodgers, Sonia Sanchez, and Ntozake Shange. Shange’s choreopoem titled for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1975) is a series of monologues in which Black women recount stories of abuse and disillusionment. A choreopoem is a dramatic performance that includes music and dance as well as poetry or narrative. Shange and other women writers sought to build a sisterhood that reclaimed the Black female voice and honored the Black Arts Movement from a feminist perspective. 
The artistic and political efforts of these authors of the mid-1900’s formed the basis for courses in Black studies in many universities in the United States. The Black Scholar (founded in 1969) was the first scholarly journal to promote Black studies. Negro Digest (published 1942-1951, 1961-70, and under the name Black World from 1970-1976) became a major platform for up-and-coming Black writers of the movement.
The late 1900’s.
Much Black literature written in the late 1900’s and early 2000’s has been described as “post-soul” literature. The term was coined by Nelson George, a writer and editor of works on popular culture. It refers to writers born during or after the civil rights movement of the mid-1950’s to late 1960’s who were far enough removed from the movement to view it more critically. These writers also criticized the Black Arts Movement era for oversimplifying racial issues. They explored such themes as the duality of being a Black American citizen and the irony of being both well versed on white culture and isolated from it. Toni Cade Bambara’s Salt Eaters (1980), for example, depicts a disillusioned activist’s failed suicide attempt and healing in order to reimagine the path of post-civil rights African American activism.
Some authors sought to redefine Blackness to more fully recognize the diversity among Black people. They acknowledged that factors such as class, gender, political affiliation, regional location, and sexuality all influence the individual experiences of African Americans. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), Audre Lorde famously challenges racism, sexism, and homophobia as interlocking systems of oppression for Black lesbians like herself. Lorde asserts that celebrating difference is the means for social progress. Percival Everett’s satirical novel Erasure (2001) suggests that Black writers have had to perpetuate racial stereotypes in order to please literary critics.
The late 1900’s saw a rise in publications from Black female writers, including Elizabeth Alexander, Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, Gayl Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, and Gloria Naylor. Alice Walker won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Color Purple (1982), a novel about an isolated unwed mother forcibly separated from her children. Rita Dove was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987 for Thomas and Beulah (1986). In 1988, Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer for her novel Beloved (1987). Beloved is about a formerly enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of her child, whom she killed during her attempt to escape from slavery. In 1993, Morrison became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
Other post-soul authors include Paul Beatty, Samuel R. Delany, Trey Ellis, Ernest J. Gaines, Danzy Senna, and Kevin Young. Yusef Komunyakaa won the 1994 Pulitzer prize in poetry for Neon Vernacular (1993).
The 2000’s.
African American voices and experiences have been central to American literature of the 2000’s. August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks emerged as leading playwrights during the late 1900’s and early 2000’s. Before his death in 2005, Wilson completed a cycle of 10 major plays. The cycle traces the Black experience in the United States throughout the 1900’s. Parks’s plays explore such topics as slavery, racism, urban poverty, and the legacy of past discrimination. Wilson won Pulitzer Prizes for drama for Fences (1985) and The Piano Lesson (1987). Parks received the prize for Topdog/Underdog in 2001. Lynn Nottage became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama twice, in 2009 for Ruined (2007) and in for 2017 for Sweat (2015).
Black poets in the early 2000’s have combined various mediums and poetry forms, including the written word, the spoken word, and music. They tell compelling stories about the complexities of identity and African American experiences. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) by the Jamaican-born poet Claudia Rankine, incorporates poetry and photography to examine death, alienation, and the collective anxieties of Americans following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Other prominent poets of this period include Amanda Gorman, Robin Coste Lewis, Gregory Pardlo, Danez Smith, Tracy K. Smith, and Natasha Trethewey.
Black speculative fiction began to develop in African American literature in the late 1900’s. Speculative fiction is literature, including science fiction and some fantasy, that intertwines aspects of the contemporary world with futuristic or supernatural elements. Historically, white male writers dominated speculative fiction, which emphasized adventure and the technical possibilities of the future. Octavia Butler’s groundbreaking novel Parable of the Sower (1993) and its sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998), follow a young Black woman as she navigates through future social upheaval to establish her own religious commune as a refuge. The series illustrates the negative impacts of social and technological advances on communities of color. It also shows how the remnants of slavery can resurface in a seemingly advanced future. 
Beginning in the late 1900’s, many Black novelists began to produce works of myth, ritual, and magic realism to reflect on the legacies of slavery and racial prejudice. African spirituality and magic help young women fight oppression in such books as Who Fears Death (2010) by the Nigerian-born American author Nnedi Okorafor and Children of Blood and Bone (2018) by the African American author Tomi Adeyemi. Black speculative fiction departs from the focus on realism in much African American literature. Works by Butler and her successors demonstrate how the otherworldliness of speculative fiction can speak to the alienation in the Black experience.
Another popular form of African American literature of the 2000’s is historical fiction about African Americans who were silenced or completely erased from early recorded history. Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001) takes focus away from the famed Scarlett O’Hara of the novel Gone with the Wind (1936) and re-directs readers’ attention to the lives of the enslaved Black characters of the book’s Civil War setting. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) illustrates the experiences and obstacles two fictional characters endure in seeking freedom through the underground railroad. In her poetry collection Olio (2016), Tyehimba Jess blends history and fiction to reimagine the stories of actual African American musical performers and artists from the pre-Civil War era to the first years of the 1900’s.
