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50 Favorite African-American Authors of the 20th Century. 1,826 readers cast votes back in 2001 for their favorite African-American authors. Here we share the 50 authors who received the most votes ranked in the order of the total number of votes received.
- Toni Morrison. Among numerous accolades, Toni Morrison was the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and the first Black woman to be an editor at Random House.
- Anna J. Cooper. Author and Black liberation activist Anna J. Cooper was born into slavery in the 1850s yet earned a doctorate in history from the University of Paris, becoming the fourth African American woman in history to get a doctorate.
- James Baldwin. Best known for his essays on race, class, and sexuality (although he also wrote novels and plays), James Baldwin was a champion and leading voice of the American civil rights movement.
- Gwendolyn Brooks. The first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for her 1949 collection "Annie Allen"), Gwendolyn Brooks was a revered poet and author.
- W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) > Birthplace: Great Barrington, MA. A co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P. and leader of the Niagara Movement for equal rights, W.E.B. DuBois was a scholar and prolific writer as well as the first African American to earn a Ph.D.
- James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) > Birthplace: Jacksonville, FL. An executive officer of the N.A.A.C.P. for ten years, James Weldon Johnson was a human rights activist, diplomat, poet, and novelist.
- Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) > Birthplace: Fredericksville, NJ. Highly influential during the ’20s, author and educator Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote about black characters who were working professionals during a time when the concept was not widely accepted.
- Claude McKay (1889-1948) > Birthplace: Clarendon Parish, Jamaica. Jamaican-American poet and novelist Claude McKay helped pave the way for future poets to openly discuss racism in America.
- Maya Angelou. Acclaimed American poet, author and activist Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1928. Often referred to as a spokesman for African Americans and women through her many works, her gift of words connected all people who were “committed to raising the moral standards of living in the United States.”
- James Baldwin. Though he spent most of his life living abroad to escape the racial prejudice in the United States, James Baldwin is the quintessential American writer.
- Amiri Baraka. Born in 1934, poet, writer and political activist Amiri Baraka used his writing as a weapon against racism and became one of the most widely published African American writers.
- Octavia Butler. In a genre known for being traditionally white and male, Octavia Butler broke new ground in science fiction as an African American woman.
- Overview
- Antebellum literature
- Slave narratives
African American literature, body of literature written by Americans of African descent. Beginning in the pre-Revolutionary War period, African American writers have engaged in a creative, if often contentious, dialogue with American letters. The result is a literature rich in expressive subtlety and social insight, offering illuminating assessments of American identities and history. Although since 1970 African American writers, led by Toni Morrison, have earned widespread critical acclaim, this literature has been recognized internationally as well as nationally since its inception in the late 18th century.
(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s Britannica essay on African American literature.)
African Americans launched their literature in North America during the second half of the 18th century, joining the war of words between England and its rebellious colonies with a special sense of mission. The earliest African American writers sought to demonstrate that the proposition “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence required that Black Americans be extended the same human rights as those claimed by white Americans. Couching a social justice argument in the Christian gospel of the universal brotherhood of humanity, African-born Phillis Wheatley, enslaved in Boston, dedicated her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first published African American book, to proving that “Negros, Black as Cain,” were not inherently inferior to whites in matters of the spirit and thus could “join th’ angelic train” as spiritual equals to whites. Composing poems in a wide range of classical genres, Wheatley was determined to show by her mastery of form and meter, as well as by her pious and learned subjects, that a Black poet was as capable of artistic expression as a white poet. Poems on Various Subjects provided a powerful argument against the proslavery contention that the failure of African peoples to write serious literature was proof of their intellectual inadequacies and their fitness for enslavement. The poetry and sermons of Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806?), an enslaved man who was born in New York but later lived in Connecticut, buttressed the demand of early African American writers for literary recognition, though the major theme of his writing is the urgency of Christian conversion.
In 1789 Olaudah Equiano, Wheatley’s most famous Black literary contemporary, published his two-volume autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. A British citizen who had experienced enslavement in the Americas, Equiano has been traditionally regarded, along with Wheatley, as the founder of African literature in English by virtue of his having pioneered the slave narrative, a firsthand literary testimony against slavery which, by the early 19th century, earned for African American literature a burgeoning readership in Britain as well as in the United States. One of the most remarkable features of Equiano’s story is his use of African origins to establish his credibility as a critic of European imperialism in Africa. Recent research, however, has raised questions about whether Equiano was born an Igbo (Ibo) in Africa, as he claims in his autobiography. His baptismal record in Westminster, England, lists him on February 9, 1759, as “Gustavus Vassa a Black born in Carolina 12 years old.” Scholars have also debated whether Equiano’s account of Igbo life in his autobiography is based on reading rather than memory. In the absence of scholarly consensus on these controversial matters, The Interesting Narrative remains a pivotal text in portraying Africa as neither morally benighted nor culturally backward but rather as a model of social harmony defiled by Euro-American greed.
Britannica Quiz
Poetry: First Lines
In the wake of the bloody Nat Turner rebellion in Southampton county, Virginia, in 1831, an increasingly fervent antislavery movement in the United States sponsored firsthand autobiographical accounts of slavery by fugitives from the South in order to make abolitionists of a largely indifferent white Northern readership. From 1830 to the end of the slavery era, the fugitive slave narrative dominated the literary landscape of antebellum Black America. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) gained the most attention, establishing Frederick Douglass as the leading African American man of letters of his time. By predicating his struggle for freedom on his solitary pursuit of literacy, education, and independence, Douglass portrayed himself as a self-made man, which appealed strongly to middle-class white Americans. In his second, revised autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass depicted himself as a product of a slave community in Maryland’s Eastern Shore and explained how his struggles for independence and liberty did not end when he reached the so-called “free states” of the North. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, candidly describes her experience of the sexual exploitation that made slavery especially oppressive for Black women. Chronicling what she called “the war” of her life, which ultimately won both her own freedom and that of her two children, Jacobs proved the inadequacy of the image of victim that had been applied pervasively to enslaved women and girls. Her work and the antislavery and feminist oratory of the New York formerly enslaved woman who renamed herself Sojourner Truth enriched early African American literature with unprecedented models of eloquence and heroism.
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Feb 24, 2021 · Novelists like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, who wrote best-sellers and won prestigious awards, have accelerated the attention paid to African American authors, and Black intellectuals...
Oct 1, 2020 · By. Robert Longley. Updated on October 01, 2020. African American women writers have helped bring the Black woman's experience to life for millions of readers. They've written of what it was like to live in bondage, what Jim Crow America was like, and what 20th and 21st century America has been like for Black women.
