Richard Nathaniel Wright was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries suffering discrimination and violence. Literary critics believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century.
Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader, from picture books for the very young to young adult fiction.
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in two volumes in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S., and is said to have "helped lay the groundwork for the [American] Civil War".
Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognized as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition thus is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also includes literature of other traditions produced in the United States and in other immigrant languages. Furthermore, a rich tradition of oral storytelling exists amongst Native Americans.
Brian Moore, was a novelist and screenwriter from Northern Ireland who emigrated to Canada and later lived in the United States. He was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland during and after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The Troubles, and has been described as "one of the few genuine masters of the contemporary novel". He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1975 and the inaugural Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1987, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Moore also wrote screenplays and several of his books were made into films.
Ernest James Gaines was an American author whose works have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese. Four of his works were made into television movies.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Lolita Files is an American author, screenwriter, and producer. Among her six bestselling novels are book club favorites Scenes from a Sistah and Child of God. Her sixth novel, sex.lies.murder.fame was optioned for film by Carolyn Folks for Entertainment Studios with Files adapting the screenplay.
Christopher Paul Curtis is an American children's book author. His first novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963, was published in 1995 and brought him immediate national recognition, receiving the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award and the Newbery Honor Book Award in addition to numerous other awards. In 2000, he became the first person to win both the Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award—prizes received for his second novel Bud, Not Buddy—and the first African-American man to win the Newbery Medal. His novel The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 was made into a television film in 2013.
Jabari Asim is an author, poet, playwright, and professor of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Crisis magazine, a journal of politics, ideas and culture published by the NAACP and founded by historian and social activist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910. In February 2019 he was named Emerson College's inaugural Elma Lewis '43 Distinguished Fellow in the Social Justice Center. In September 2022 he was named Emerson College Distinguished Professor of Multidisciplinary Letters.
The Bondwoman's Narrative is a novel by Hannah Crafts who claimed to have escaped from slavery in North Carolina. The manuscript was not authenticated and properly published until 2002. Some scholars believe that the novel was written between 1853 and 1861. It is one of the very first books by an African-American woman, others including the novel Our Nig by Harriet Wilson, published in 1859, and the autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, published in 1861.
Wilhelm Delano Meriwether is an American physician and a former track and field athlete. He is best known for having been the head of the United States government immunization program during the 1976 swine flu outbreak and as the 1971 US outdoor track and field champion in the 100-yard dash.
Eloise Greenfield was an American children's book and biography author and poet famous for her descriptive, rhythmic style and positive portrayal of the African-American experience.
Andrea Hairston is an African-American science fiction and fantasy playwright and novelist. Her novel Redwood and Wildfire won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for 2011. Mindscape, Hairston's first novel, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was short-listed for the Philip K. Dick Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Hairston was one of the Guests of Honor at the science fiction convention Wiscon in May 2012.
Mabel Louise Robinson was an American writer of children's books. She was passionate about writing books for young adults. Her "primary goal in life [was to] write books for young women, showcasing the protagonists worth, intelligence, and sensitivity". Robinson reached her goal by “bring[ing] realistic and believable young adult problems to modern girl readers looking not only for excitement and fun but for honestly and reality as well. Additionally,… [she] created vivid characters with whom girls could easily identify ”. Robinson was a runner-up for the annual Newbery Medal twice.
James Kendall Hosmer was an American (Union) soldier during the American Civil War, a pastor, library director, historian, author and a professor of history and literature. Members of the Hosmer family fought in the French and Indian War, American Revolution and the Civil War. As a pastor of the First Church in Deerfield, Massachusetts he left the ministry, feeling duty bound to join the U.S. Army to serve in the Civil War, insisting to serve at the front, where he participated in several major campaigns. As an author and historian he later wrote and published several works about and involving the Civil War and how he viewed the cause of both the North and South. He also authored a number of other works relating to early American history, along with several novels and a fair number of poems. Hosmer also reviewed and published accounts about the Lewis and Clark Expedition at a time when full accounts of the expedition were very few in number and out of print. During his career he corresponded with many prominent writers and historians involving his works. In his latter life he held several prominent positions in various literary associations, including his position as president of the American Library Association.
Louise Meriwether was an American novelist, essayist, journalist and activist, as well as a writer of biographies of historically important African Americans for children. She is best known for her first novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), which draws on autobiographical elements about growing up in Harlem, New York City, during the Depression and in the era after the Harlem Renaissance.
Harlem Writers Guild (HWG) is the oldest organization of African-American writers, originally established as the Harlem Writers Club in 1950 by John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy, John Henrik Clarke, Willard Moore and Walter Christmas. The Harlem Writers Guild seeks to give African-American writers a platform to present their art in its entirety without censoring their experience of being Black in the United States of America. In addition to publishing works, the Harlem Writers Guild also acts as an organization to promote social change and an entity that hosts events to celebrate and promote their members.
Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present is a compilation of orature and literature by more than 200 women from Africa and the African diaspora, edited and introduced by Margaret Busby, who compared the process of assembling the volume to "trying to catch a flowing river in a calabash".
