Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurston's beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God , is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie... (more)

Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth

Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth

by Richard Wright

Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi amid poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those around him; at six he was a "drunkard," hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common... (more)

Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

Manchild in the Promised Land is indeed one of the most remarkable autobiographies of our time. This thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s. When the... (more)

Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

James Baldwin's portrayal of black people in Harlem caught up in a dramatic struggle, and of a society confronting inevitable change.

Roots

by Alex Haley

This "bold . . . extraordinary . . . blockbuster . . ". (Newsweek) begins with a birth in 1750, in an African village; it ends seven generations later at the Arkansas funeral of a black professor whose children are a teacher, a Navy architect, an assistant director of the U.S. Information Agency, and an author. The author is Alex Haley.

"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity

"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity

by Beverly Daniel Tatum

Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see black youth seated together in the cafeteria. Of course, it's not just the black kids sitting together-the white, Latino, Asian Pacific, and, in some regions, American Indian youth are clustered in their own groups, too. The same phenomenon can be observed in college dining halls, faculty lounges, and corporate cafeterias. What is going on here? Is this... (more)

Sula

by Toni Morrison

Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and... (more)

Parting the Waters

America in the King Years, 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations. Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a... (more)

My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir

by Clarence Thomas

Provocative, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest, My Grandfather's Son is the story of one of America's most remarkable and controversial leaders, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, told in his own words. Thomas was born in rural Georgia on June 23, 1948, into a life marked by poverty and hunger. His parents divorced when Thomas was still a baby, and his father moved north to Philadelphia, leaving his... (more)

The Confessions of Nat Turner

by William Styron

A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel based on the true story of an abortive slave rebellion in 1831 gives a chilling account of a noble man's moral decline. Reissue.

The Well : David's Story

by Mildred D. Taylor

During a drought, the Logan family shares its well water with all its neighbors, black and white alike. But David and Hammer find it hard to share with Charlie Simms, who torments them because they are black. "A brief but compelling story about prejudice and the saving power of human dignity".--"School Library Journal".

Nobody Knows My Name

by James Baldwin

Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays examines topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society, and offers personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.

Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Paperback)

Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Paperback)

by James Baldwin

Originally published in 1955, James Baldwin's first nonfiction book has become a classic. These searing essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and Americans abroad remain as powerful today as when they were written. "He named for me the things you feel but couldn't utter. . . . Jimmy's essays articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the... (more)

The Color Purple

by Alice Walker

Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she... (more)

Sounder

by Jeannette Sanderson, William Howard Armstrong, James Barkley

The Powerful Newbery Award-Winning Classic A landmark in children's literature, winner of the 1970 Newbery Medal, and the basis of an acclaimed film, Sounder traces the keen sorrow and the abiding faith of a poor African-American boy in the 19th-century South. The boy's father is a sharecropper, struggling to feed his family in hard times. Night after night, he and his great coon dog, Sounder, return to the... (more)

Fences

by August Wilson

A Pulitzer Prize winner. Garbage collector Troy Maxson clashes with his son over an athletic scholarship.

The Piano Lesson

by August Wilson

Set in 1936, The Piano Lesson is a powerful new play from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. A sister and brother fight over a piano that has been in the family for three generations, creating a remarkable drama that embodies the painful past and expectant future of black Americans.

A Raisin in the Sun (Vintage)

by Lorraine Hansberry

When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever."--The New York Times.

At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (Modern Library Paperbacks)

At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Philip Dray

Winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction This extraordinary account of lynching in America, by acclaimed civil rights historian Philip Dray, shines a clear, bright light on American history’s darkest stain—illuminating its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. Philip Dray also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose and eradicate... (more)

God's Trombones

Seven Negro Sermons in Verse

by James Weldon Johnson, James Weldon JOHNSON, James Weldon Johnson and Roy Ringwald, James Weldon Johnson, James Weldon Johnson

This collection of poems attempts to recreate a vanishing part of Black American spiritual culture - the inspirational sermons of old-time Negro preachers. Using punctuation and line arrangements he captures the fervour of the congregation and underlines the importance of these sermons in the development of Black culture. James Wheldon Johnson is the author of "Along this Way" and "The Autobiography of an... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: african american experience

by Zora Hurston

by Richard Wright

by Claude Brown

by James Baldwin

by Alex Haley

by Beverly Daniel Tatum

by Toni Morrison

America in the King Years, 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

by Clarence Thomas

by William Styron

by Mildred D. Taylor

by James Baldwin

by James Baldwin

by Alice Walker

by Jeannette Sanderson, William Howard Armstrong, James Barkley

by August Wilson

by August Wilson

by Lorraine Hansberry

by Philip Dray

Seven Negro Sermons in Verse

by James Weldon Johnson, James Weldon JOHNSON, James Weldon Johnson and Roy Ringwald, James Weldon Johnson, James Weldon Johnson