Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the African-American director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Following the Civil Rights Movement during the 20th century, interest in the works of Chesnutt was revived. Several of his books were published in new editions, and he received formal recognition. A commemorative stamp was printed in 2008.
Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point-of-view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation as Antoinette is caught in a white, patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica.
Beloved is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison. Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The narrative of Beloved derives from the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person in the slave state of Kentucky who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856.
George Barr McCutcheon was an American popular novelist and playwright. His best known works include a series of novels set in Graustark, a fictional East European country, and the novel Brewster's Millions, which was adapted into a play and several films.
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a 1977 Newbery Medal awarded novel by Mildred D. Taylor. It is a part of her Logan family series, a sequel to her 1975 novella Song of the Trees.
A Lesson Before Dying is Ernest J. Gaines' eighth novel, published in 1993. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel is based on the true story of Willie Francis, a young Black American man best known for surviving a failed electrocution in the state of Louisiana in 1946.
Sutton Elbert Griggs was an author, Baptist minister, and social activist. He is best known for his novel Imperium in Imperio, a utopian work that envisions a separate African-American state within the United States. He was African-American.
American Baptist College is a private, Baptist college in Nashville, Tennessee, affiliated with the National Baptist Convention, USA. Founded in 1924, its predecessor in black Baptist education was Roger Williams University, a Nashville college begun in the late-19th century and closed in the early 20th century. Upon full accreditation by the American Association of Bible Colleges, ABTS dropped use of the term "Theological Seminary" and renamed itself American Baptist College. The college has an 82% acceptance rate. In Fall 2019, 77% of students were retained after the first year of attendance.
Peter Berling was a German actor, film producer and writer. He has worked on several occasions with director Werner Herzog, among them his collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski like Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde.
The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 is a historical-fiction novel by Christopher Paul Curtis. First published in 1995 by Delacorte Press, it was reprinted in 1997. It tells the story of the Watsons, a lower middle class African-American family living in Flint, Michigan in the early 1960s from the perspective of Kenny Watson, the middle child of three. The first part of the novel focuses on Kenny's struggles to make friends as a smart and thoughtful ten-year-old, then shifts in setting when his parents decide to deliver their oldest son, Byron, to live with his grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama. The family embarks on a road trip to the Deep South, and while visiting Alabama, they get caught up in a tragic historical event of the Civil Rights Movement.
Thomas Frederick Dixon Jr. was an American Baptist minister, politician, lawyer, lecturer, writer, and filmmaker. Referred to as a "professional racist", Dixon wrote two best-selling novels, The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900 (1902) and The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), that romanticized Southern white supremacy, endorsed the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, opposed equal rights for black people, and glorified the Ku Klux Klan as heroic vigilantes. Film director D. W. Griffith adapted The Clansman for the screen in The Birth of a Nation (1915). The film inspired the creators of the 20th-century rebirth of the Klan.
Black science fiction or black speculative fiction is an umbrella term that covers a variety of activities within the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres where people of the African diaspora take part or are depicted. Some of its defining characteristics include a critique of the social structures leading to black oppression paired with an investment in social change. Black science fiction is "fed by technology but not led by it." This means that black science fiction often explores with human engagement with technology instead of technology as an innate good.
Young West: A Sequel to Edward Bellamy's Celebrated Novel "Looking Backward" is an 1894 utopian novel, written by Solomon Schindler, radical rabbi of Boston. As its subtitle indicates, the book was one of the many responses and sequels to Edward Bellamy's famous 1888 novel Looking Backward, and was one volume in the major wave of utopian and dystopian writing that distinguished the later nineteenth century.
"The Wife of His Youth" is a short story by American author Charles W. Chesnutt, first published in July 1898. It later served as the title story of the collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line. That book was first published in 1899, the same year Chesnutt published his short story collection The Conjure Woman.
The Belton Estate is a novel by Anthony Trollope, written in 1865. The novel concerns itself with a young woman who has accepted one of two suitors, then discovered that he was unworthy of her love. It was the first novel published in the Fortnightly Review.
Bertha Antoinetta Rochester is a character in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre. She is described as the violently insane first wife of Edward Rochester, who moved her to Thornfield Hall and locked her in a room on the third floor.
Dwight A. McBride is an American academic administrator and scholar of race and literary studies. From April 16, 2020 to August 2023, he served as the ninth president of The New School. McBride previously served as provost, executive vice president for academic affairs, and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of African American studies at Emory University.
Lillian Bertha Jones Horace was an African American author, educator, and librarian from Fort Worth, Texas, best known for her novels Five Generations Hence (1916), Crowned with Glory and Honor, and Angie Brown. These are the earliest novels on record written by an African-American woman from Texas. Horace married and divorced twice, and continued to teach, travel and write throughout her life. At the time of her retirement, she had been an educator for over thirty years.
Kenneth W. Warren is an American academic and author. He is a professor of English at the University of Chicago. He is a scholar of American and African American literature from the late 19th century to the middle 20th century.
