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.
Novels and short stories
William Wells Brown
CLOTEL; OR, THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER
Frederick Douglass
THE HEROIC SLAVE
Harriet E. Wilson
OUR NIG; OR, SKETCHES FROM THE LIFE OF A FREE BLACK
Nella Larsen
QUICKSAND
PASSING
THE WRONG MAN
FREEDOM
SANTUARY
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
A CARNIVAL JANGLE
VIOLETS
THE WOMAN
TEN MINUTES MUSING
TITIEE
Charles W. Chesnutt
THE GOOPHERED GRAPEVINE
PO' SANDY
SIS' BECKY'S PICKANINNY
THE DOLL
THE WIFE OF HIS YOUTH
DAVE'S NECKLISS
THE PASSING OF GRANDISON
A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE
THE SHERIFF'S CHILDREN
BAXTER'S PROCRUSTES
Paul Laurence Dunbar
THE SCAPEGOAT
Jean Toomer
BECKY
Poetry
Phillis Wheatley
POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL
Frances E. W. Harper
POEMS
Langston Hughes
THE WEARY BLUES
Countee Cullen
COLOR
COPPER SUN
THE BALLAD OF THE BROWN GIRL
Non-fiction
Olaudah Equiano
THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO, OR GUSTAVUS VASSA, THE AFRICAN
Mary Prince
THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE, A WEST INDIAN SLAVE
Charles Ball
A NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF CHARLES BALL
Frederick Douglass
NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE
Josiah Henson
THE LIFE OF JOSIAH HENSON
Solomon Northup
TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE
Harriet Ann Jacobs
INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
Elizabeth Keckley
BEHIND THE SCENES
Louis Hughes
THIRTY YEARS A SLAVE
Booker T. Washington
UP FROM SLAVERY
William Still
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
Henry Box Brown
James Hambleton Christian
Theophilus Collins
Seth Concklin
William And Ellen Craft
Abram Galloway And Richard Eden
Charles Gilbert
Samuel Green
Jamie Griffin
Harry Grimes
James Hamlet And Others
John Henry Hill
Ann Maria Jackson And Her Seven Children
Jane Johnson
Matilda Mahoney
Mary Frances Melvin
Aunt Hannah Moore
Alfred S. Thornton
Essays
W. E. B. Du Bois
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
Charles W. Chesnutt
THE DISFRANCHISEMENT OF THE NEGRO
Paul Laurence Dunbar
REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN NEGROES
