Editorial Advisory Board xv

Preface xvi

Introduction xxi

Principles of Selection and Editorial Procedures xxv

Acknowledgments xxvii

Part 1 The Literatures of the New Negro Renaissance: c.1920-1940 1

Introduction 3

Claude McKay (1889-1948) 7

Jessie Fauset (1882-1961) 58

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) 77

Countée Cullen (1903-1946) 125

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) 137

Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934) 164

Helene Johnson (1906-1995) 190

Alain Locke (1885-1954) 197

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) 207

George S. Schuyler (1895-1977) 219

Dorothy West (1907-1998) 244

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) 251

Nella Larsen (1891-1964) 261

Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989) 318

Richard Wright (1908-1960) 332

Part 2 The Literatures of Modernism, Modernity, and Civil Rights: c.1940-1965 385

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) 391

Robert Hayden (1913-1980) 418

Chester Himes (1909-1984) 426

Ann Petry (1908-1997) 441

James Baldwin (1924-1987) 472

Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) 512

Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) 599

Part 3 The Literatures of Nationalism, Militancy, and the Black Aesthetic: c.1965-1975 607

Amiri Baraka (b. 1934) 613

Adrienne Kennedy (b. 1931) 637

Larry Neal (1937-1981) 649

Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) 661

Michael S. Harper (b. 1938) 665

Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934) 672

Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995) 680

June Jordan (1936-2002) 686

Part 4 The Literatures of the Contemporary Period: c.1975 to the Present 709

Samuel Delany (b. 1942) 715

Ntozake Shange (b. 1948) 725

Alice Walker (b. 1944) 733

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) 761

Octavia Butler (1947-2006) 778

Gloria Naylor (b. 1950) 808

Toni Morrison (b. 1931) 820

Rita Dove (b. 1952) 835

August Wilson (1945-2005) 869

Jamaica Kincaid (b. 1949) 915

Ernest J. Gaines (b. 1933) 922

Suzan-Lori Parks (b. 1963) 947

Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969) 951

Walter Mosley (b. 1952) 957

Percival Everett (b. 1956) 978

John Edgar Wideman (b. 1941) 988

Harryette Mullen (b. 1953) 999

Edward P. Jones (b. 1950) 1005

Charles R. Johnson (b. 1948) 1021

Glossary 1032

Timeline 1040

Name Index 1053

Subject Index 1058

"Gene Andrew Jarrett reintroduces to us voices that we do not often hear in anthologies. Works by Harryette Mullen, Suzan-Lori Parks, Walter Mosely, and Percival Everett, among others, glow and sing here, and complete the broad mosaic that Professor Jarrett so successfully reconstructs of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature by people of African descent."
--Nathan L Grant, African American Review
"Expansive, instructive, fascinating and surprising, this magnificent anthology is pieced together with superb editorial judgment and offers insights on every page. Here is a rich, many-voiced literary tradition unfolding across the centuries in all its exhilarating diversity and unmatched power. Certain to become seminal and essential, this is a treasure that belongs on all our bookshelves."
--Zoe Trodd, University of Nottingham

"A deeply and dynamically qualitative engagement with the complex history of African American literary expression, from its broad, interconnecting roots through to its diverse socio-political outlook. As Gene Andrew Jarrett attests, this is not an encyclopedic volume, nor does it intend to be: instead, Jarrett provides the reader with a cogent and memorable seminar in the intellectual history of U.S. Black creative expression. Essential analyses of style, genre, and artistic revolutions are present here, allowing each selection to retain its unique contribution even while locating it within collective movements. For instructors, this anthology will provide even neophytes with a rich, layered, and nuanced understanding of a grand tradition; for scholars and lay readers alike, this anthology offers a new yet grounded take on a literature and a people three centuries old yet always in the making and (re)making."
--Michelle M. Wright, Northwestern University

"With its recognition of the claims and issues of a new millennium, the Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature - in its desire to unsettle traditions, its representation of African American literary diversity, its playful decentering of canonical protocols, and its delight in the ironies of racial expression - may well be called the first postmodern African American literary anthology. For African Americanist scholars and teachers, this anthology is a long-awaited treasure. With its excellent period introductions, headnotes, textual annotations, a glossary and timeline that present the latest scholarship, this anthology responds to the contemporary moment. Along with what the editors calls a "scholarly and pedagogic ecosystem" that connects the print anthology with an entire audio and visual network of scholarship and pedagogy, this anthology is not only responding to, but creating, the contemporary study and teaching of African American literature."
--Mary Helen Washington, University of Maryland
"The Wiley-Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature is a welcome new intervention, full of strikingly fresh choices and featuring as many works in their entirety, and as many longer selections of major works, as possible. These volumes will help recast the vast range of U.S. black writing for a generation to come."
--Eric Lott, University of Virginia

Gene Andrew Jarrett is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Boston University. He earned his A.B. in English from Princeton University and his A.M. and Ph.D. in English from Brown University. Jarrett is the author of Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (2011) and Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (2007), and the editor or co-editor of several volumes and collections of African American literature and literary criticism. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Editorial Advisory Board
Daphne A. Brooks, Princeton University
Joanna Brooks, San Diego State University
Margo Natalie Crawford, Cornell University
Madhu Dubey, University of Illinois, Chicago
Michele Elam, Stanford University
Philip Gould, Brown University
George B. Hutchinson, Cornell University
Marlon B. Ross, University of Virginia
Cherene M. Sherrard-Johnson, University of Wisconsin, Madison
James Edward Smethurst, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Werner Sollors, Harvard University
John Stauffer, Harvard University
Jeffrey Allen Tucker, University of Rochester
Ivy G. Wilson, Northwestern University

G. A. Jarrett, Boston University, USA