“When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do,” Toni Morrison wrote in her Nobel Prize-winning 1977 novel Song of Solomon. The powerful theme she poignantly described, illustrates the power of the pen in both preserving one's identity, and, as Black authors have done for decades, capturing the previously untold complexities of the Black experience.
What's more, these eloquent storytellers, who have contributed endless works of art, from poems, plays and essays to novels and nonfiction staples, have also taken up the mantle for their ancestors - many of whom were forced, in chains, from their African homeland to the United States - to tell their stories that had previously been passed down only verbally.
For writers, narratives are often a synthesis of their real-life experiences and observations. While many writers have had struggles, be their personal tragedies, health issues, lack of acceptance, or economic disadvantages, African American writers have had a much steeper slope to climb. Fortunately, many notable African American writers have broken through and had their distinctive voices heard in ways that continue to reverberate to this day.
Here are some of the best-selling Black authors whose voices have both shaped and defined literary history:
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Maya Angelou
Acclaimed American poet, author and activist Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1928. One of the most prolific writers of our time, Black or otherwise, Maya Angelou's storied career spanned several decades and included the publication of everything from poetry and essays to several autobiographies, including 1969's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
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“I want to write so that the reader … can say, ‘You know, that’s the truth." Influenced by Black authors like Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, her love of language developed at a young age. A prolific poet, her words often depict Black beauty, the strength of women and the human spirit, and the demand for social justice. Her first collection of poems Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1972, the same year she became the first Black woman to have a screenplay produced. Writing for adults and children, Angelou was one of several African American women at the time who explored the Black female autobiographical tradition.
The deeply personal (and highly successful) book - which chronicled Angelou's experiences of rape, identity and racism as a young girl in the south - earned the author the distinction of penning the first nonfiction best-seller by an African American woman. With other works, such as Angelou's 1981 memoir, The Heart of a Woman, flying off shelves, the Pulitzer nominee was a longtime fixture on bestsellers lists.
Twenty-four years after I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' release, Angelou read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, and the 1969 autobiography once again landed on the bestseller list, with sales reportedly skyrocketing 500 percent. (Her 2014 death at the age of 86 had the same effect on sales.)
Maya Angelou gestures while speaking in a chair during an interview at her home in 1978.
Zora Neale Hurston
The daughter of two formerly enslaved people, Zora Neale Hurston was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. By the time of its height in the 1930s, Hurston was a preeminent Black female writer in the United States. Of Hurston’s more than 50 published novels, short stories, plays and essays, she wrote her most famous work Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937.
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After releasing acclaimed short stories, such as 1926's "Sweat," and essays, including the autobiographical "How It Feels to be Colored Me" in 1928, Hurston eventually wrote her classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937. Three years later, she published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, to great critical acclaim.
Unlike the style of contemporaries Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston did not write explicitly about Black people in the context of white America. Despite her earlier literary success, Hurston would suffer later in her career. Having difficulty getting published, she died poor and alone. Years later, Alice Walker would help revive interest in Hurston’s work with her essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," published in Ms. magazine in 1975. This essay, alongside her edits of notable works like “I Love Myself When I am Laughing and Then Again When I am Looking Mean and Impressive,” brought Hurston to the attention of a new generation of readers.
In 2005, Winfrey’s Harpo Productions aired a television movie version of Their Eyes Were Watching God, which starred actors Halle Berry, Michael Ealy and Terrence Howard.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) at a book fair, New York, New York, circa 1937.
Langston Hughes
A primary contributor of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes was one of the first to use jazz rhythms in his works, becoming an early innovator of the literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes, a poet, playwright, and novelist, made history pioneering the use of jazz rhythms in poetry beginning in the 1920s.
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Langston Hughes summed up his mission in a 1926 manifesto, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” writing, “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.”
Influenced by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman, his poetry caught the attention of novelist, critic and prolific photographer Carl Van Vechten. With Van Vechten’s help, his first collection of poetry was published in 1926. Establishing Hughes’s poetic style and commitment to Black themes and heritage, The Weary Blues had popular appeal. When his first novel Not Without Laughter was published in 1930, it won the Harmon gold medal for literature. A prolific writer known for his colorful portrayals of Black life from the 1920s-1960s, Hughes wrote plays, short stories, poetry, several books, and contributed the lyrics to a Broadway musical. In addition to his extensive body of work, he inspired other artists and highlighted the power of art as a catalyst for change. Seen as a voice for their own experience, writers during the Harlem Renaissance often dedicated their work to Hughes.
Famed as a Harlem Renaissance poet, novelist and playwright, Hughes published his first novel Not Without Laughter in 1930, earning great commercial success - and the Harmon gold medal for literature. In addition to myriad poems and plays, the one-time student of New York City's Columbia University also published autobiographies, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, as well as one of his most famous poems, “Harlem (Dream Deferred)" in 1951.
Portrait of American author Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967), a phonograph record in hand, 1954.
James Baldwin
Born in Harlem amidst the Harlem Renaissance, essayist, novelist, poet, and playwright James Baldwin first made a name for himself with the 1953 novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” which explored controversial themes of race, sexuality, and religion. Though he spent most of his life living abroad to escape the racial prejudice in the United States, James Baldwin is the quintessential American writer.
Born in Harlem in 1924, Baldwin caught the attention of fellow writer Richard Wright who helped him secure a grant in order to support himself as a writer. He left to live in Paris at age 24 and went on to write Go Tell it on the Mountain which was published in 1953, a novel unlike anything written to date. Speaking with passion and depth about the Black struggle in America, it has become an American classic.
Successive works would venture more deeply into taboo topics including homosexuality and interracial relationships. Baldwin is perhaps best known for his essay collections, including “The Fire Next Time” and “Nobody Knows My Name,” through which he became known as a major voice on civil rights. His work on issues of race inspired Time magazine to do a feature story on Baldwin, in which the publication stated of him: “There is not another writer … who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South.”
Famed essayist, playwright and novelist James Baldwin rose to literary prominence through works such as his insightful semi-autobiographical 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1955's Notes of a Native Son, 1962's Another Country, and 1963's The Fire Next Time. After selling more than one million copies, his 1961 collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, earned him a spot on the bestsellers list.
The Harlem-born writer, who was highly adept at tackling issues of race, sexuality and spirituality, had several of his pieces adapted for the big screen. Among them: 2016 Academy Award Best Documentary Feature nominee I Am Not Your Negro which was based on his unfinished Remember This House manuscript, as well as the 2019 Barry Jenkins-directed (and also Oscar-nominated) If Beale Street Could Talk, based on Baldwin's 1974 novel.
Alex Haley
Alex Haley’s writing on the struggle of African Americans inspired nationwide interest in genealogy and popularized Black history. Best known for The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the novel Roots, Haley began his writing career freelancing and struggled to make ends meet.
While there's some disparity over official sales figures, it's safe to say that Alex Haley's 1976 classic, Roots, has sold well over five million copies. (Most estimates actually hover near the six million mark.) What's even safer to say is that the story of Haley's ancestors - beginning with 18th-century enslaved African Kunta Kinte - is one of the most important works depicting the horrors and subsequent fallout of the Atlantic enslaved person trade.
Proving to be such a success, the magazine contracted Haley to do a series of interviews with prominent African Americans. Known as “The Playboy Interviews,” Haley would eventually meet Malcolm X and ask permission to write his biography. Embarking on a new ambitious project, Haley was determined to trace his ancestor’s journey from Africa to America as slaves, and tell the story of their rise to freedom. After a decade of research and travel to West Africa, the epic novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family was published in 1976. The book was a national sensation and won the Pulitzer Prize, eventually becoming a television miniseries that would shatter television viewing records when 130 million viewers tuned in.
In 1977, Haley won the fiction Pulitzer Prize for Roots, which was also adapted into two miniseries. Another of the author's best-known works, 1965's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a collaboration between the journalist and the civil rights activist who was assassinated in Harlem in 1965, also sold in comparable numbers to Roots.
Alex Haley, author of book, Roots, at the Broadway department store book department in Fox Hills Mall. Those waiting to have Haley autograph copies of his book formed a line a mile and a half long.
Michelle Obama
When they went low, Michelle Obama's sales numbers went high. Although it was only released in November 2018, the first-time author and the former first lady's memoir, Becoming, has already made history.
Though best known for her role as First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama has given many powerful speeches and done wonderful civic work for children and for justice in society. BECOMING is Michelle Obama's memoir which covers her childhood in Chicago, her awareness of being a minority in college, and her marriage and political work.
With reading enthusiasts buying more than three million books shortly following its publication, not only did the tome sell more copies in just one-and-a-half months than any other book in all of 2018, it also is “among the fastest-selling nonfiction books in history and already among the best-selling political memoirs of all time,” according to the Associated Press.
Michelle Obama (L) discusses her book ’Becoming’ with Sarah Jessica Parker at Barclays Center on December 19, 2018 in New York City.
Toni Morrison
Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison (1931 - 2019) is considered the voice of African American women. Growing up in an integrated neighborhood, Morrison was not fully aware of racial divisions until her teenage years.
In 1988, Toni Morrison won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel Beloved, which told the harrowing story of a formerly enslaved person following the Civil War. After writing the 1987 release, which was also adapted into a 1998 film starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover, Morrison went on to earn 1993's Nobel Prize in Literature for her 1997 book, Song of Solomon.
Dedicated to her studies, she went on to earn her master’s degree before moving to Howard University to teach. While she had published The Bluest Eye in 1970 and Sula in 1973, The Song of Solomon was the book that set her on the course of literary success. It became the first work by an African American author since Native Son by Richard Wright to be a featured selection in the Book-of-the-Month Club. The publication of Beloved in 1987 is considered to be her greatest masterpiece and won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Additional titles, like her first novel, 1970's The Bluest Eye, as well as 1973's Sula were but a few of Morrison's works that made a lasting mark on the record of the African American experience.
Toni Morrison photographed in New York City in 1979.
Alice Walker
Alice Walker is a civil rights activist and author known for the novel “The Color Purple,” which was also turned into an Academy Award-nominated film. Walker grew up poor in a family of eight children. Her mother worked as a maid to support them. At the age of 8, she was shot in her right eye with a BB gun, and the accident made her withdraw socially, thinking that she was “ugly and disfigured.” As a result, she had withdrawn into reading and writing poetry.
Also adapted into a 1985 film starring Winfrey and Glover and directed by Steven Spielberg, The Color Purple, which Alice Walker had published three years prior, won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in the fiction category. In addition to her 1930s-set book, which also spawned a Broadway stage adaptation, Walker's later bestsellers included 2006's We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For and 2010's The World Has Changed.
She made history with the novel when she became the first African American woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1982).
American author and poet Alice Walker.
Terry McMillan
Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan's breakout female-centric third novel that she published in 1992, spent several months on The New York Times bestseller list, and, by 1995, sold more than three million copies. The same year, a Forest Whitaker-directed big-screen adaptation hit theaters, with Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, and Lela Rochon leading the ensemble cast.
Another of the Michigan native's bestsellers, 1996's How Stella Got Her Groove Back, was adapted into a 1998 film also starring Bassett, this time alongside Whoopi Goldberg and Taye Diggs.
Terry McMillan signs books at Entertainment Weekly’s PopFest at The Reef on October 29, 2016 in Los Angeles, California.
Other Notable African American Writers
Beyond the authors highlighted above, numerous other African American writers have made significant contributions to literature and culture. These include:
- Amiri Baraka: A controversial poet, dramatist, and author who wrote on issues ranging from Black liberation to politics in Cuba and music.
- Octavia Butler: A groundbreaking science fiction author who won Hugo and Nebula Awards and explored themes of race, sex, power, and humanity.
- W.E.B. Du Bois: An activist, sociologist, historian, and writer who studied Black America and called for an end to racism.
- Ralph Ellison: A literary critic, writer, and scholar known for his novel Invisible Man, which explored universal truths through the lens of racial identity.
- bell hooks: An influential author, professor, and feminist who wrote on the intersection of race, class, and gender.
African American Poets Laureate
The Library of Congress has a rich history of recognizing and celebrating Black poets. Robert Hayden was the first Black poet to serve as Consultant in Poetry in 1976. Gwendolyn Brooks was the 29th and final poet to serve as Consultant in Poetry before the position’s title was rebranded as Poet Laureate in 1985. Rita Dove was named as a Special Bicentennial Consultant. Natasha Trethewey was appointed the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Tracy K. Smith was appointed the 22nd Poet Laureate.
These are just a few of the many influential African American writers who have shaped literary history and continue to inspire readers today. Their works offer valuable insights into the Black experience and contribute to a broader understanding of American culture.
