This companion volume to Masterpieces of World Literature (1989) highlights the literary achievements of African-American authors from the 18th century to the present with individual articles on 149 major works of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. Each article contains the important facts and dates of authorship along with analyses of characters, settings, themes, and plots. A unique & vital guide that summarizes, explains, & evaluates the...

"Buck is a powerful memoir of how a precocious kid educated himself through the most unconventional teachersoutlaws and eccentrics, rappers and mystic strangers, ghetto philosophers and strippers, and, eventually, an alternative school that transformed his life with a single blank sheet of paper. It's a one-of-a-kind story about finding your purpose in life, and an inspiring tribute to the power of education, art, and love to heal and redeem...

A brief biography of the author and college professor whose travels across the United States inspired her to write the poem which became the song "America the Beautiful."

After seeing a girl raped and becoming obsessed with her, sixteen-year-old Thulani finds motivation to move beyond his interest in his pigeons and his grief over his mother's death.

Dr. Sabine R. Ulibarri needs no introduction to the aficionados of good literature, for his bilingual short stories have been favorites for many years in classrooms around the nation.

She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s-and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the citys underworld, she was the only member of his...

Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual, James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the postwar era, and one of the greatest African-American writers of this century. A self-described "transatlantic commuter" who spent much of his life in France, Baldwin joined a cosmopolitan sophistication to a fierce engagement with social issues. Early Novels and Stories presents the novels and short stories that established...

In Jason Mott's Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott's novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour. As these characters' stories build and build...

The author describes his motorcycle journey through Minnesota and the Rockies to the Alaskan Highway, recalling the events in his life that have made him the man he is today.