African American History

Category: Reading Lists, Historical Fiction

• Best African American fiction 2009\\

• The Bluest Eye\\

• Cane River\\

• Wake of the Wind\\

• Fever Season\\

• Red River\\

• Incognegro\\

• Mama Day\\

• Sula\\

• The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman\\

• The Color Purple\\

• Their Eyes Were Watching God\\

(:title African American History:) (:description selected historical fiction about African Americans - March 2011:)

Compiled by Forbes Library Staff | Summaries from ContentCafe, NoveList, Wikipedia, Amazon.com | March 2011

• Their Eyes Were Watching God
  by Zora Neale Hurston
  An American classic, this book is a luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years.
• The Color Purple
  by Alice Walker
  "The Color Purple" is foremost the story of Celie, a poor, barely literate Southern black woman who struggles to escape the brutality and degradation of her treatment by men. The tale is told primarily through her own letters, which, out of isolation and despair, she initially addresses to God.
• The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
  by Ernest J. Gaines
  Miss Jane Pittman is 110 when she recalls her childhood and the arrival of both Union and Confederate troops on the plantation where she lived.
• Sula
  by Toni Morrison
  At the heart of Sula is a bond between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel are both black, both smart, and both poor. Through their girlhood years, they share everything. All this changes when Sula gets out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where there hides a fierce resentment at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped.
• Mama Day
  by Gloria Naylor
  Miranda Day, matriarch of an island off the coast of the U.S., fights a mortal combat with dark forces that threaten her great-niece, Cocoa, who has married and gone to the mainland.
• Incognegro
  by Mat Johnson; art by Warren Pleece; lettered by Clem Robins
  The early 20th Century: an era when lynchings were commonplace throughout the American South. To most of the press, this epidemic of racial murder wan't even news. But a few courageous reporters from the North risked their lives to expose these atrocities. They were light-skinned African-American men who could 'pass' for white. They called this dangerous assignment 'going incognegro.'
• Red River
  by Lalita Tademy
  The intertwining stories of two Louisiana families--three generations of African-American men--and their struggles to make a place for themselves in a country deeply divided in the aftermath of the Civil War and beyond.
• Fever Season
  by Barbara Hambly
  After black free man of color Benjamin January returns to New Orleans to end a 16-year absence, he must treat victims of the cholera epidemic, but when he realizes that other free blacks are disappearing, he investigates.
• Wake of the Wind
  by J. California Cooper
  When the slaves' emancipation reaches Texas, a Black woman named Lifee and her family rely on their extraordinary resilience and ingenuity to face the reverberations of slavery and stake out a farm and a home of their own.
• Cane River
  by Lalita Tademy
  Cane River is an isolated community that lies on a small river in central Louisiana. There in the early 19th century, slaves, free people of color, and Creole French planters lived and worked, loved and bore children. The author discovered her amazing heritage there and chronicles four generations of strong, determined black women.
• The Bluest Eye
  by Toni Morrison
  This is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
• Best African American fiction 2009
  Gerald Early, series editor; E. Lynn Harris, guest editor
  A collection that celebrates the contributions of African-American authors features short stories and novel excerpts by Michael Thomas, Jacqueline Woodson, Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Stephen Carter, and Christopher Paul Curtis.
  YF.9B464aa 2009

Category: Reading Lists, Historical Fiction