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A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings....
Briton Hammon's A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man-Servant to General Winslow, of Marshfield, in New England: Who Returned to Boston, After Having Been Absent Almost Thirteen Years is published and is regarded as the first work of prose written by a black American. Hammon's Narrative is, in fact, a travelogue of the author's various exploits in England and Nova Scotia. -
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Vol. I. One of the first documented slave narratives -
Period: to
Early African American Fiction
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Birth of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Many Northerners also fou -
Birth of Frances Ellen Watkins
Frances Ellen Watkins was born to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland. After her mother died when she was three years old in 1828, Watkins was orphaned. She was raised by her maternal aunt and uncle. She was educated at the Academy for Negro Youth, a school run by her uncle Rev. William Watkins, who was a civil rights activist. He was a major influence on her life and work. At fourteen, she found work as a seamstress. -
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and ex-slave, Frederick Douglass. It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of his life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States. -
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Academy and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.
Influenced Iola Leroy. Harper admired Stowe's writing. -
Clotel, or, The President's Daughter
Author and playwright William Wells Brown, an escaped slave from Kentucky who was active on the anti-slavery circuit. Brown published the book in London, where he stayed to evade possible recapture due to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, but it is considered the first novel published by an African American. It is a tragic mulatto story about a woman named Currer and her daughters Althesa and Clotel, fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Their relatively comfortable lives end after Jefferson's death. -
My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
It is the second of three autobiographies written by Douglass, and is mainly an expansion of his first (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass), discussing in greater detail his transition from bondage to liberty. -
Our Nig; Or Sketches from the Life of A Free Black In A Two Story White House, North
It considered the first novel published by an African-American woman on the North American continent. Written by Harriet Wilson -
The Two Offers
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's "The Two Offers" is believed to be the first short story published by an African American author. This accomplishment would be one of many firsts in the extraordinary career of the nineteenth century's most well-known black writer. By the time she published "The Two Offers" in 1859 Harper had already established herself as a popular and well-respected poet, lecturer, and activist. -
Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl by Linda Brent, aka Harriet Jacobs
While on one level it chronicles the experiences of Harriet Jacobs as a slave, and the various humiliations she had to endure in that unhappy state, it also deals with the particular tortures visited on women at her station. Often in the book, she will point to a particular punishment that a male slave will endure at the hands of slave holders, and comment that, although she finds the punishment brutal in the extreme, it cannot compare to the abuse that a young woman must face. -
The Curse of Caste; Novel by Julia C. Collins, first novel by AA woman
Published in 1865 as a serial in the Christian Recorder, the national newspaper of the AME Church. Dr. William L. Andrews at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill believes it to be the first novel by a black American woman ever to appear in print."This is indisputably the first serialized novel by an African-American woman to be uncovered, and the first that is not grounded in autobiography but is is instead a fully-fledged creation of the imagination." -
Minnie's Sacrifice
by Frances Harper -
Sowing and Reaping
By Frances Harper -
Trial and Triumph
By Frances Harper -
From Darkness Cometh Light: Slave Narrative
Written by Lucy Delaney, influenced Iola Leroy
She devotes a significant portion of the narrative to her mother's attempts to prove that she was once a free woman. Both she and Lucy presented their cases in trials, and both received verdicts granting them freedom. The remainder of the narrative briefly outlines Lucy's life after slavery. Her first husband was killed in a tragic accident shortly after their marriage. -
Iola Leroy
Is one of the first novels published by an African-American woman. While following what has been termed the "sentimental" conventions of late nineteenth-century writing about women, it also deals with serious social issues of education for women, passing, miscegenation, abolition, reconstruction, and social responsibility. -
The House Behind the Cedars
Written by Charles Chestnutt, later adapted into a film by Oscar Micheaux in 1927. It explores the issues of race, class and identity in the post-Civil War South. -
Up From Slavery; Autobiography of Booker T. Washington.
Details his work to rise from a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton University, to his work establishing vocational schools—most notably the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama—to help black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful, marketable skills and work to pull themselves, as a race, up by the bootstraps. -
The Marrow of Tradition; Historical novel by Charles Chestnutt
A fictional retelling of the rise of the white supremacist movement, specifically as it aided the fomentation of what was originally referred to as the “race riots” that took place in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. -
Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois
It contains several essays on race, some of which had been previously published in Atlantic Monthly magazine. Du Bois drew from his own experiences to develop this groundbreaking work on being African-American in American society. Outside of its notable place in African-American history, The Souls of Black Folk also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works to deal with sociology. -
Death of Frances Harper
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The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
A fictional telling of the story of a young biracial man, referred to only as the “Ex-Colored Man", living in post Reconstruction era America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Ex-Colored Man was forced to choose between embracing his black heritage and culture by expressing himself through the African-American musical genre ragtime, or by “passing” and living obscurely as a mediocre middle-class white man. Weldon's text is an example of a roman à clef. -
Cane by Jean Toomer
The novel is structured as a series of vignettes revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States. The vignettes alternate in structure between narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue. As a result, the novel has been classified as a composite novel or as a short story cycle. -
Quicksand by Nella Larsen
Helga Crane is a fictional character loosely based on Larsen's experiences in her early life. Crane is the lovely and refined mixed-race daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father. He abandoned her mother and Helga soon after the girl was born. Unable to feel comfortable with her European-American relatives, Crane lives in various places in the United States and visits Denmark, searching for people among whom she feels at home. -
Passing by Nella Larsen
Clare and Irene were two childhood friends, both of African and European ancestry. They lost touch when Clare's father died, and she moved in with two paternal white aunts. They allowed her to 'pass' as a white woman and marry a white man, who is a racist. Many see this novel as an example of the plot of the tragic mulatto, a common figure in early African-American literature after the American Civil War. -
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Written by Zora Neale Hurston
The main character, an African American woman in her early forties named Janie Crawford, tells the story of her life and journey via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby, so that Pheoby can tell Janie's story to the nosy community on her behalf. Her life has three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three very different men.
