Selected Bibliography

PRIMARY LITERATURE

Anthologies

Barksdale, Richard C. and Keneth Kinnamon, eds. Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology. New York: McMillan, 1972.

Cade, Toni, ed. The Black Woman. New York: New American Library, 1970.

Chapman, Abraham, ed. New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Afro-American Literature. New York: Mentor, 1972.

Donalson, Melvin, ed. Cornerstones: An Anthology of African American Literature. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., Nellie Y. McKay, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: Norton, 1996.

Hamer, Judith A., and Martin J. Hamer, eds. Centers of the Self: Short Stories by Black American Women from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

Hill, Patricia Liggins, Bernard W. Bell, Trudier Harris, et al., eds. Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

James, Charles L., ed. From the Roots: Short Stories by Black Americans. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970.

Koolish, Lynda, ed. African American Writers: Portraits and Visions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

McMillan, Terry, ed. Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Terry McMillan’s anthology is one of the best documents of the wave of African American fiction writers who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the contents are short stories, although a few novel chapters may be found within as well. Major authors include: McMillan, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, J. California Cooper, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Darryl Pinckney, Trey Ellis, and John Edgar Wideman.

Major, Clarence, ed. Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African-American Short Stories. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

Mullen, Bill. Revolutionary Tales: African American Women’s Short Stories, From the First Story to the Present. New York: Laurel, 1995.

Naylor, Gloria, ed. Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.

O’Hearn, Claudine Chiawei, ed. Half and Half: Writers on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural. New York: Pantheon, 1998.

Powell, Kevin, ed. Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature. New York: Wiley, 2000.

Powell, Kevin, and Ras Baraka, eds. In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers. New York: Harlem River Press, 1992.

Quashie, Kevin Everod, Joyce Lausch, and Keith D. Miller, eds. New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America. Upper Saddle, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001.

New Bones features writers of fiction, poetry, drama, essays, criticism, autobiography, and philosophy from 1970 through 2001. One of the most thorough anthologies of its kind, as both new and more established authors are included, with helpful biographies accompanying each author’s contributions.

Reed, Ishmael, ed. 19 Necromancers from Now. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1970.

Reed gathers together many of the major voices in African American fiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with two Asian-American authors, Frank Chin and Shawn Wong, added to the mix. Its major weakness is the complete absence of women authors, despite the volume’s mission to be an introduction to the experimental fiction of the era’s writers of color. Nevertheless, the selections are consistently excellent and provocative. Featured authors include Reed, Cecil Brown, Ronald Fair, William Melvin Kelley, Clarence Major, John A. Williams, Charles Wright, and Al Young.

Reed, Ishmael, and Al Young, eds. Yardbird Lives! New York: Grove, 1978.

This is a compilation of poetry, fiction, and drama printed in Yardbird Reader, a magazine published and edited by novelist Ishmael Reed from 1972 to 1976. Contributing authors include Amiri Baraka, Cecil Brown, Claude Brown, Steve Cannon, Victor C. Cruz, Bob Fox, Colleen J. McElroy, Merceditas Manabat, E. Ethelbert Miller, Ibn Mukhtarr Mustapha, Francisco Newman, Thulani Nkabinde, Diana Rollins, Ntozake Shange, Lorenzo Thomas, Shawn Wong, and many others.

Reed, Ishmael, Kathryn Trueblood, and Shawn Wong, eds. The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980–1990. New York: Norton, 1992.

Robotham, Mary, ed. Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers. New York: Basic Civitas, 2003.

Rowell, Charles H., ed. Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995.

——, ed. Making Callaloo: Twenty-five Years of Black Literature. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002.

Ruff, Shawn Stewart, ed. Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of Gay and Lesbian Fiction by African-American Writers. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

Smith, Rochelle, and Sharon L. Jones. The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000.

Washington, Mary Helen. Black-eyed Susans: Classic Stories by and About Black Women. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1975.

Weaver, Afaa M., ed. These Hands I Know: African-American Writers on Family. Louisville, Ky.: Sarabande, 2002.

Worley, Demetrice A., and Jesse Perry Jr., eds. African-American Literature: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC Publishing Group, 1998.

Young, Al, ed. African American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Young, Kevin, ed. Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers. New York: Perennial, 2000.

Poet Young’s anthology stands as one of the best collections of recent African American fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. As the subtitle indicates, all of the authors included are of the younger, “Post-Soul” generation: those born from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Nearly the entire the volume is split between fiction and poetry, with the remaining space devoted to creative nonfiction or memoir. Fiction writers include: Edwidge Danticat, Carolyn Ferrell, Randall Kenan, Darieck Scott, Danzy Senna, Natasha Tarpley, Colson Whitehead, and Daniel Jerome Wideman.

SECONDARY LITERATURE

Books: Relevant Literary and Cultural Criticism

Abel, Elizabeth, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, eds. Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Abrams, Meyer Howard. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 5th ed. New York: Holt, 1988.

Asante, Molefi Kete. Afrocentricity. 3d ed. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1988.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Black Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

——. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

——. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Baker considers the major issues in African American literary studies since the 1950s, including a retrospective of the then-recent Black Arts Movement and black aesthetic.

——. Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972.

——. Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.

——. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Baker assays a study of the importance of the autobiographical and spiritual elements in African American literature, especially that produced by key black women writers. Two of those, Toni Morrison and Ntozake Shange, are the subjects of the later chapters.

Baker, Houston A., Jr., and Patricia Redmond, eds. Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Banks, William M. Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life. New York: Norton, 1996.

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.

Bell provides one of the most complete reviews of the African American novel from its roots and antecedents in African oral traditions and abolitionist literature, through the early antebellum and postbellum novels, the pre–World War I period, the Harlem Renaissance, and Naturalism, ending in the contemporary period.

Bell, Derrick. And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice. New York: Basic, 1987.

——. Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester. Boston: Beacon, 1994.

——. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic, 1992.

——. Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival for an Alien Land Called Home. New York: Basic, 1996.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Black American Women Fiction Writers. New York: Chelsea House, 1995.

Most of the authors discussed in this collection of biographies are from the contemporary period, including Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, June Jordan, Terry McMillan, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ann Petry, and Alice Walker.

——., ed. Contemporary Black American Fiction Writers. New York: Chelsea House, 1995.

Bracks, Lean’tin L. Writings on Black Women of the Diaspora: History, Language, and Identity. New York: Garland, 1998.

Bruck, Peter, and Wolfgang Karrer, eds. The Afro-American Novel Since 1960. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1982.

Butler, Robert. Contemporary African American Literature: The Open Journey. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.

This volume includes chapters on Hurston, Ellison, Walker’s Third Life of Grange Copeland, Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Johnson’s Faith and the Good Thing, Reed’s Flight to Canada, Williams’s Dessa Rose, and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Byerman, Keith. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986.

Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. 1985. Reprint: New York: Teachers College Press, 1997.

——. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980.

Cooke, Michael G. Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984.

Dick, Bruce Allen, and Pavel Zemliansky. The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Critical Responses in Arts and Letters 31. Ed. Cameron Northouse. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999.

Dickson-Carr, Darryl. African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.

Dixon, Melvin. Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Dubey, Madhu. Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

——. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

——. Skin Trade. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

DuCille places greater emphasis here on popular culture and the academy than on literature per se, but her observations are as relevant to discussions of contemporary African American literature and culture as her earlier The Coupling Convention.

Ellison, Ralph. Going to the Territory. New York: Random House, 1986.

——. Shadow and Act. 1964. Reprint: New York: Vintage, 1995.

Ervin, Hazel Arnett. African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. New York: Twayne, 1999.

Fisher, Dexter, and Robert B. Stepto, eds. Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1979.

Fossett, Judith Jackson, and Jeffrey A. Tucker, eds. Race Consciousness: African American Studies for the New Century. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Fox, Robert Elliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies 106. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987.

Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison’s Fiction. Understanding Contemporary American Literature. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

Gaines, Kevin K. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

——, ed. “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

——. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Sunday Ogbonna Anozie, eds. Black Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Methuen, 1984.

Gayle, Addison, Jr., ed. The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.

——. Bondage, Freedom, and Beyond: The Prose of Black Americans. Garden City, N.Y.: Zenith Books, 1971.

——. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975.

Harper, Michael S., and Robert B. Stepto, eds. Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Darlene Clark Hine, and Leon Litwack, eds., The Harvard Guide to African-American History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Hogue, W. Lawrence. The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

——. Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986.

——. Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960s. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Hubbard, Dolan. The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994.

Only the last chapter, on Toni Morrison’s Sula and Song of Solomon, specifically concerns contemporary literature. Hubbard’s larger theory, however, is generally applicable to contemporary fiction, especially neo–slave narratives.

Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982.

James, Darius. That’s Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadasssss ’Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury). New York: St. Martin’s, 1995.

Jimoh, A. Yemisi. Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction: Living in Paradox. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002.

Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Novelist Johnson’s brief review of the arc of contemporary African American fiction begins with philosophical discussions of “race,” fiction, and form as they developed in the post-Civil Rights era, then divides the remainder of his study into two long chapters (approximately thirty pages each) on “The Men” and “The Women” that offer short, critical assessments of specific major authors. While this division along gender lines is problematic, Johnson’s text is otherwise a fine introduction to the major works of African American fiction in the period covered.

Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Karenga, Maulana Ron. Introduction to Black Studies. Inglewood, Calif.: Kawaida Publications, 1982.

Kester, Gunilla Theander. Writing the Subject: Bildung and the African American Text. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Mackey’s study is divided almost equally between poetry and fiction, but its focus is mostly contemporary and its emphasis is on the poetics of recent literature. Not all of the authors discussed are African American, although most are of African descent.

Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics. London: Macmillan, 1988.

Matus, Jan. Toni Morrison. Contemporary World Writers. Ed. John Thieme. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.

McGee, Patrick. Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.

Mitchell, Angelyn, ed. Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. The Apocalypse in African-American Fiction. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

Moraga, Cherríe L., and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Napier, Winston, ed. African American Literary Theory: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Neal, Mark Anthony. Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Nielsen, Aldon L. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

——. Writing Between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Nunez, Elizabeth, and Brenda M. Greene, eds. Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the 90s. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

Defining Ourselves contains essays on the state of African American literature in the 1990s from such authors as Paule Marshall, Amiri Baraka, John A. Williams, Ishmael Reed, Walter Mosley, Jill Nelson, Thulani Davis, Arthur Flowers, Bebe Moore Campbell, Brent Staples, Terry McMillan, Stanley Crouch, Houston A. Baker Jr., Barbara Christian, Karla F. C. Holloway, Marita Golden, and William W. Cook.

Page, Philip. Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Pinckney, Darryl. Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. New York: Basic Civitas, 2002.

Reed, Thomas Vernon. Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Roberts, John W. From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Rodriguez, Max. Sacred Fire: The QBR 100 Essential Black Books. New York: Wiley, 1999.

Lists, summarizes, and analyzes the most distinguished works in over two hundred years of African American literary history.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Soitos, Stephen F. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

Stuckey, Sterling. Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Sundquist, Eric J. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

——. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993.

——, ed. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Bedford Documentary Companion. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

——, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.

Tate, Greg. Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

Wall, Cheryl, ed. Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Features essays by Abena P. A. Busia, Barbara Christian, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, Gloria T. Hull, Deborah E. McDowell, Valerie Smith, Hortense Spillers, Claudia Tate, and Susan Willis regarding key issues in criticism about African American women’s literature and culture.

Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Weisenburger, Steven. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon, 1993.

Books: Biographies

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1969.

Baraka, Imamu Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1997.

Boyer, Jay. Ishmael Reed. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1993.

Carroll, Rebecca. Swing Low: Black Men Writing. New York: Crown, 1995.

Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Smith, Valerie, Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz, eds. African American Writers. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991; rev. ed., 2000.

Winchell, Donna Haisty. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

Journals and Magazines

African American Review, formerly Negro American Literature Forum (1967–76) and Black American Literature Forum (1976–1991).

American Literature

Amistad. Ed. John A. Williams and Charles Harris. New York: Random House, 1970–1971.

Callaloo (1976–)

CLA Journal (1957–)

MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature in the United States) 12, no. 2 (Summer 1985) is devoted to “Black American Literature.”

Review of Contemporary Fiction

Journal Articles

Bergenholtz, Rita A. “Toni Morrison’s Sula: A Satire on Binary Thinking,” African American Review 30, no. 1 (1996), 89–98.

Blake, Susan L. “Ritual and Rationalization: Black Folklore in the Works of Ralph Ellison.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 94, no. 2 (1979), 121–36.

Bryant, Jerry H. “Old Gods and New Demons: Ishmael Reed and his Fiction.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 4, no. 2 (1984): 195–202.

Ellis, Trey. “The New Black Aesthetic.” Callaloo 12, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 233–46.

Harris, Norman. “The Black University in Contemporary Afro-American Fiction.” CLA Journal 30 (1986): 1–13.

Lesoinne, Veronique. “Answer Jazz’s Call: Experiencing Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” MELUS 22 (1997): 151–66.

Mason, Theodore O., Jr. “Performance, History, and Myth: The Problem of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.” Modern Fiction Studies 34, no. 1 (1988): 97–109.

Mitchell, Angelyn. “‘Sth, I Know That Woman’: History, Gender, and the South in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 31, no. 2 (1998): 49–60.

Page, Phillip. “Traces of Derrida in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” African American Review 29, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 55–66.

Ryan, Judylyn S., and Estella C. Májoza. “Jazz… on ‘The Site of Memory.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 31, no. 2 (1998): 125–52.

Wright, Richard. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” The New Challenge: A Literary Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1937).

Interviews

Carroll, Rebecca. I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice and Vision of Black Women Writers. New York: Carol Southern, 1994.

Denard, Carolyn. “Blacks, Modernism, and the American South: An Interview with Toni Morrison.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 31, no. 2 (1998): 1–16.

Martin, Reginald. “An Interview with Ishmael Reed.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 4, no. 2 (1984): 176–87.

Nazareth, Peter. “An Interview with Ishmael Reed.” Iowa Review 13, no. 2:117–30.

Newman, Katharine. “An Evening with Hal Bennett: An Interview.” Black American Literature Forum 21, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 357–78.

Reference Materials

Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

The Oxford Companions are arguably the crème de la crème of quick literary references, concerned as they are with providing brief biographies and concise assessments of an author’s or text’s significance. The introduction of this particular volume was as significant to scholars as the publication of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature the previous year was to both scholars and students.

——. The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

As the title implies, this is a shorter, and therefore more portable version of the landmark 1997 Companion. Its conciseness is a result of the editors’ decision to highlight “the writers and the writing that have made African American literature valuable and distinctive for more than 250 years,” regardless of genre. It has also been updated and corrected, with entries noting the lives and works of newer authors.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas, 1999.

Appiah and Gates’s magnum opus was both inspired by and meant to be the embodiment of the “Encyclopædia Africana” that legendary African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois had dreamed of compiling for over five decades until his death in 1963. Du Bois envisioned his “Encyclopædia Africana” as the equivalent to the Encyclopædia Britannica, with the focus specifically on the history, culture, and works of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora. Despite some contemporary controversy about the volume’s corporate funding and editorial direction, Appiah and Gates indeed created arguably the most comprehensive single-volume reference to all matters linked to Africans and people of African descent. It stands as an invaluable reference for both research and public libraries.

Davis, Thadious M., and Trudier Harris, eds. Dictionary of Literary Biography. 112 vols. Vol. 33, Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984.

Along with their later Afro-American Dramatists and Prose Writers After 1955 (1985), the thirty-eighth volume in this series, Davis and Harris’s collection is arguably the greatest reference source on contemporary African American authors published until its time. It comprises forty-nine author entries, the overwhelming majority of which are now major authors in African American literary tradition. It is, however, too expensive for most individuals, as it is meant to be purchased by research libraries. It is also now outdated, although most scholars will find its entries invaluable for an understanding of the lives and early careers of those writers who began publishing in the thirty year period the volume covers. Scholars should note that the prose writers in the subtitle of volume 38 are those who have written nonfictional prose.

Magill, Frank N., ed. Masterpieces of African American Literature. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Magill’s collection, a companion to Masterpieces of World Literature, provides biographies and plot summaries to the most prominent authors and works in the African American literary tradition in a single, affordable volume.

Mason, Elizabeth B., and Louis M. Starr, eds. The Oral History Collection of Columbia University. New York: Oral History Research Office, 1979.

Matuz, Roger, et al., eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Today’s Novelists, Poets, Playwrights, Short Story Writers and Other Creative Writers. 70 vols. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The New York Public Library African American Desk Reference. New York: Wiley, 1999.

This compendium of historical facts, timelines, statistical data, organizational information, and bibliographies is one of the most accessible and affordable quick references for both lay and professional scholars of African American history, literature, and culture. It is divided into nineteen sections, such as “Education,” “The Arts,” “Family and Heritage,” “The Diaspora,” and “Literature and Language.” Each section contains a short overview of its subject, followed by lists of organizations, outlets, notable figures or groups, and a bibliography for further reference.

Smith, Valerie, Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz, eds. African American Writers. New York: Collier, 1993.

An excellent collection of literary biographies of the major writers in the African American literary tradition, including such contemporary authors as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ish-mael Reed, John Edgar Wideman, and Ralph Ellison.