LibGuides: African American Literature: African-American Literature

Primary Full Text Resources

20th Century African-American Poetry
12,000 poems by more than 100 African-American poets, with biographical profiles.
African-American Poetry, 1760-1900
Almost 3000 poems written by African-American poets in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The poets are among those in the William French et al. bibliography, including Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar.
African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
from the New York Public Library Digital Library Collections, digital Schomburg.
American Verse Project
from the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative that includes African American poets if you search by name or poem title.
Project for the History of Black Writing at KU
from the University of Kansas. You can download their bibliography of novels and poetry by Black authors.
The Zora Neale Hurston Plays
from the Library of Congress.

WWW Sources

Black Literature
from Documenting the American South's Library of Southern Literature. Use the subject index to access works.
Brief Guide to the Harlem Renaissance
from Poets.org
Toward Racial Equality: Harper's Weekly Reports on Black America, 1857-1874
provides text and cartoons from Harper's Weekly and a simulation game.
Langston Hughes
from An Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to the Anthology of Modern American Poetry, from the
Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Harlem Renaissance 1913 - 1937
PAL: Perspectives in American Literature - A Research and Reference Guide - An Ongoing Project - by Paul P. Reuben at California State University, Stanislaus; a chapter on the Harlem Renaissance.
Stone Center Guide to the Web
From the Sonja Haynes Stone Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Texts by and about African-Americans from the Modern English Collection -
from the Electronic Text Center at University of Virginia Library.
Voices from the Gaps Women Artists and Writers of Color
From the English Department of the University of Minnesota.
VG, Artist Biographies: African American
University of Minnesota.

Locating Secondary Sources for Book Reviews & Criticism

MLA
The MLA International Bibliography is the most comprehensive database for literary criticism. It indexes journal articles, books, parts of books and dissertations.
Academic Search Complete
an interdisciplinary database that includes journals and magazines from many disciplines. Articles will include locate both book reviews, biography and criticism.
Humanities International Complete
present literary, scholarly and creative journals from 1975 to the present.
Literary Research Center
published by EBSCOhost with articles, biographies, reviews and books in full text.

Biographical Reference Sources

African American Authors, 1745-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ref PS153 .N5 A32 2000
African American Writers. Ref PS153 .N5 A344 1990
Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Ref PS153.N5 B675 2006
The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ref PS153.N5 O96 1997
The Schomburg Center Guide to Black Literature. Ref PN841 .S3465 1995

Reference Books for Literary Criticism

African American Writers. Ref PS153 .N5 A344 1990

The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940 PS153.N5 H24 1996 v.1 - 7

Masterpieces of African-American Literature. Frank N. Magill, ed. Ref PS53.N5 M264 1992

The Pen Is Ours: A Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910 with Secondary bibliography to the Present. Ref PS153 .N5 Y44 1991

The Harlem Renaissance [electronic resource] : An Annotated Reference Guide for Student Research