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Lamar, Jake (b. 1962, Bronx, New York) Novelist and journalist Jake Lamar’s three extant novels, The Last Integrationist (1996), Close to the Bone (1999), and If 6 Were 9 (2001) play off of the themes and ideas Lamar introduced in his 1991 memoir, Bourgeois Blues, one of the better meditations upon the strange position occupied by African Americans born into the post-Civil Rights generation vis-à-vis their history, legacy, and the larger American culture. Put simply, Lamar is interested in the lives of the group of predominantly middle-class African Americans Trey Ellis called “cultural mulattoes,” those living lives within a zone between the “black” and “white” worlds made possible by the advances of the Civil Rights movement. His characters’ struggles with America’s continued entrenched racism arise from their realization that the Civil Rights movement was indeed a movement of ideals that could not be brought to fruition easily, especially in view of the backlash that followed each of the movement’s achievements. Some of Lamar’s characters, such as The Last Integrationist’s black Attorney General Melvin Hutchinson, a neoconservative ideologue, help give such backlashes momentum, but also come to realize that “race” and racism cannot be easily transcended.

Close to the Bone resembles Terry McMillan’s landmark bestseller Waiting to Exhale (1992) as a character study of several successful African Americans. The differences are that Lamar’s characters are all men and all struggle with their identities as black men, particularly with regard to their connection to African American culture. The first, Hal Hardaway, must come to terms with the interracial relationship in which he is enmeshed. His friend Walker DuPree, on the other hand, is the offspring of an interracial relationship and feels divided between the complex branches of his biracial heritage. Dr. Emmett Mercy is a psychologist who has built his career upon books his wife, whom he neglects emotionally, has ghostwritten.

If 6 Were 9 is a thriller in which professor and former black activist Reggie Brogus becomes entangled in a murder mystery that involves his colleague Clay Robinette. Along the way, Lamar lampoons academic life and creates a novel that may be compared favorably to Alexs Pate’s Multicultiboho Sideshow (1999) or Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring (1993).

LaValle, Victor D. (b. 1972, Flushing, New York) Novelist and short-story author Victor D. LaValle, who received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University, published his first collection of short stories, Slapboxing with Jesus, in 1999 to excellent reviews and reception; Barnes & Noble Booksellers picked the collection as part of its Discover Great New Writers Series that year, and it also won the PEN Open Book Award (2002). All of the stories in the volume are set in New York City and feature African American and Latino youths whose lives are guided, and frequently misguided, by the choices they make with their circumstances and opportunities. His stories are marked by their reliance upon the characters’ points of view and authentic language and slang. In 2002, LaValle published his first novel, The Ecstatic, a picaresque work that has been compared favorably to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952).

Lee, Helen Elaine (b. 1959, Detroit, Michigan) Novelist Helen Elaine Lee began writing fiction in the 1990s towards the end of a career as an attorney following her matriculation at Harvard Law School. Her debut novel, The Serpent’s Gift (1994), won immediate critical acclaim from the Washington Post Book World and the New York Times and comparisons to the best work of Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor. These comparisons are due primarily to Lee’s richly lyrical style and attention to the types of stories, cultures, and lives within the African American community that are often left out of history. The Serpent’s Gift centers on two Midwestern African American families, the Smalls and the Staples, who merge to maintain bloodlines and traditions after the deaths of the Small family patriarch in 1910.The novel logs the families’ many challenges from that point until the present, touching upon many of the major events in American and African American history in the twentieth century. Water Marked (1999) studies the lives of sisters Delta and Sunday Owens, who have spent over four decades trying to make sense of their father’s apparent suicide. As clues emerge that cast doubt upon the reality of his death, the sisters discover more about themselves and their family’s secrets and intimacies. Water Marked won more critical praise for its style and language but was also criticized for a slow, pedantic plot.

Little, Benilde (b. 1958, Newark, New Jersey) Novelist Benilde Little stands among a large class of young authors of popular fiction who debuted in the latter half of the 1990s. This class includes such bestsellers as Omar Tyree, Eric Jerome Dickey, E. Lynn Harris, and Sheneska Jackson. Like her peers, Little uses her accessible style to address social issues that concern many African Americans while focusing upon familial and romantic relationships, although Little’s novels should not be confused with formulaic romances. Her explorations of social issues are integrated fully into her plots and unpacked carefully and thoughtfully. They are also designed to appeal to the middle-class African American women Little courted as part of her former editorial position at the highly popular Essence magazine, whose articles frequently seek ways to address the audience’s concerns about health, wealth, relationships, education, and other current events and issues.

Little’s first novel, Good Hair (1996) was a major best-seller about Alice Lee, a middle-class African American woman who finds herself attracted to male members of Boston’s black bourgeoisie, many of whom hold antiquated and elitist views of their own class status within the larger African American community and hold other blacks at great physical and social distances. Lee is forced to confront her own beliefs about these class strata; the novel’s title refers to the still-common notion that “good” hair is that which is straight or most like Caucasian hair. It also refers, metaphorically, to Alice’s desire to maintain and enhance her class status in much the same way that many African American women and men seek “good” hair. Good Hair was selected as one of the Los Angeles Times’ best books of 1996. Little’s second novel, The Itch (1998), covers much the same territory as the first, although it has a more satirical bite as it points out the follies of the bourgeois lifestyle.

Lorde, Audre (b. February 18, 1934, New York City; d. November 17, 1992, New York City) At first glance, Audre Lorde might seem an odd member of this volume. In the strictest terms, Lorde was not a fiction writer; her most substantive contributions to African American literature were in the areas of poetry, and in feminist, cultural, and literary criticism. Lorde’s books The First Cities (1968), The Cancer Journals (1980; memoir), and Sister Outsider (1984) are now considered classics in poetry, memoir, and feminist criticism, respectively. She was also a founding member of Women of Color Press, a major feminist academic and literary publishing concern, and an internationally recognized activist for women’s issues. Upon these achievements alone, Lorde is a major voice in contemporary African American literature and culture.

Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography (1982), however, is difficult to classify. Not unlike Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston’s classic Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), Zami may be read either as an autobiography or a novel, as it makes extensive use of the conventions of the latter form and is narrated from the perspective of a narrator who may or may not be Lorde. Hence Lorde’s subtitle, “A Biomythography,” which connotes the process of mythmaking in which Lorde engages. Lorde herself allowed in an interview that she considered Zami a novel despite its clearly autobiographical content; many of its reviewers and critics have read it as such.

Zami resembles Lorde’s earlier Cancer Journals, which chronicles her struggles with breast cancer (the eventual cause of her death), in that it is as concerned with the process of personal growth that comes from struggling with a deadly disease as it is with women’s bodies and the ways in which they have been historically neglected. It is also a narrative of cultural clashes, specifically between the Caribbean (Barbadian/Grenadian) background that Lorde and her narrator share, and the United States. Lorde’s narrator tries to find a home in the United States, despite the fact that her parents do not consider it to be a true home. This functions as a metaphor for the narrator’s search for her identity as a woman, a mother, a lesbian, and an activist for women’s rights. To become “Zami,” means becoming a mix of all these identities while maintaining the ability to criticize them.