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The Best: Literature

August Wilson

Wilson has been compared to such playwrights as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. No other writer, with the exception of Neil Simon, has received the amount of success that Wilson has achieved. Michael Phillips of the San Diego Union-Tribune describes the playwright's words as a "rich, casually revealing language." Wilson began his writing career in grade school. After realizing that many of his classmates had forgotten about their heritage, the young writer started putting his feelings and concerns down on paper. Wilson is the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes, a Tony Award, five New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and many other accolades.

W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois remains one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. He produced over 4,000 works and his life and legacy continue to inspire a new generation of men and womento assume the task he so mightily undertook. In his own words: "Peace will be my applause."

Lanston Hughes

Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in “Montage of a Dream Deferred.” His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period--Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen--Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people without personalizing them, so the reader could step in and draw his own conclusions. Langston Hughes died in 1967.

James Baldwin

Began receiving awards and fellowships for his writings and published his first essay, The Harlem Ghetto. Became disgusted with race relations in the United States and made his home in Paris for nearly ten years. Completed the play, The Amen Corner and won the Guggenheim Fellowship. Returned to the United States and became politically active in support of civil rights.1961 - His best-selling essay collection, Nobody Knows My Name won numerous recognitions to include one of the outstanding books of the year. In1964, Published the plays The Amen Corner and Blues for Mr. Charlie. The Amen Corner opened first at Howard University under the direction of Owen Dodson.1968 - Published the novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone as a bitterly incisive account of American racism.Baldwin wrote novels, poetry, essays and a screenplay in the later years of his life. He died of stomach cancer in December 1987 at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France.

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston is one of the greatest writers/anthropologists of the 20th century. She could write about the most ordinary things and make them infinitely gorgeous. In Zora Neale Hurston's books, the reader empathizes, loves, hates, and mourns, because zora makes her characters so real and human it is impossible not to. She has the rare power to write fiction that is timeless and vibrant. The relationships, the trauma, the power struggles, everything just sears itself into your consciousness.

Alex Haley

Haley is the author of two books that have helped shape contemporary African American consciousness: The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and the novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976). The massive popularity of this historical novel and the success of the television mini-series it inspired made Haley a national figure.Roots won numerous awards, including special citations from both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize committees in 1977. He later helped develop Roots: The Next Generation (1979), a sequel to the original television mini-series; another mini-series, Queen (1993), as well as the book Alex Haley’s Queen (1993; with David Stevens), were based on dictation Haley made about his paternal great-grandmother. He died of cardiac arrest on February 10, 1992, in Seattle, Washington, and is buried on the grounds of the Alex Haley Museum in Henning, Tennessee.

Claude McKay

Though not a native American, Jamaican born Claude McKay was one of the most prominent figures in the Harlem Renaissance. His "If We Must Die" was published in the Liberator in 1919, making it one of the very first poems initiating the tone, subject, and matter of the literary movement. In 1937 McKay published his autobiography, A Long Way from Home. It was the culmination of his life as a political activist, novelist, essayist and poet. McKay died a few years later at the age of 58. He influenced several Harlem Renaissancers such as Langston Hughes, and he is considered one of the main stimulators of the Negritude Movement--another literary movement whose proponents tried to classify a black -based, African-based aesthetic founded on what the writers and poets of the Harlem Renaissance created.

Jean Toomer

Toomer spent the next four years writing and published poetry and prose in Broom, The Liberator, The Little Review and others. He actively participated in literary society and was acquainted with such prominent figures as the critic Kenneth Burke, the photographer Alfred Steiglitz and the poet Hart Crane.Toomer was married twice to wives who were white, and was criticized by the black community for leaving Harlem and rejecting his roots for a life in the white world; however, he saw himself as an individual living above the boundaries of race. His meditations center around his longing for racial unity, as illustrated by his long poem "Blue Meridian." He died in 1967.

Booker T. Washington

By the 1890s, Washington was the most prominent African-American in the country, and a number of Presidents, as well as business leaders, relied on Washington as an advisor. Other African-American leaders and intellectuals, however, most notably W.E.B. DuBois, resented Washington's message of political accommodation in favor of economic progress and distrusted his reliance on wealthy white Northerners for assistance. Leaders such as DuBois also resented Washington's willingness to use his political and economic influence in controlling ways that led them to refer to the "Tuskegee Machine." Washington's autobiography, Up From Slavery, published in 1901, followed the American tradition of the self-made man's account of his success. The work was internationally popular as well as a critical success, and brought a large amounts of much-needed funds to Tuskegee. Booker T. Washington died in 1915.

Richard Wright

In the books that followed BLACK BOY, Wright expresses his deep interest in the large questions of authority, power, and freedom. Like Cross Damon, the hero of The Outsider (1953), Wright himself had existential longings. If one understands this novel as one segment of Wright's intellectual autobiography, it is easier to understand why and how he situated himself in non-fiction works and why he was so fascinated by modern psychology in Lawd Today, Savage Holiday, and The Long Dream. Whether Wright was analyzing the independence movement and African culture in Black Power (1954), reporting on a conference at which Asian and African nations debated what should be their future in the global order in The Color Curtain (1956), or examining the political and religious intricacies of Catholic culture in Pagan Spain (1957), Wright was always the engaged writer, the brother in suffering. It is the ethos of Wright's voice, his ability to be both victim and asserter, that insures his authority and is the most enduring quality of his literary legacy.

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou is a poet, historian, author, actress, playwright, civil-rights activist, producer and director. She lectures throughout the US and abroad and is Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She has published ten best selling books and countless magazine articles. At the request of President Clinton, she wrote and delivered a poem at the 1993 presidential inauguration. Dr. Angelou began her career in drama and dance. She married a South African freedom fighter and lived in Cairo where she was editor of The Arab Observer, the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East. In Ghana, she was feature editor of The African Review and taught at the University of Ghana. In the 1960s, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ms. Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the Bicentennial Commission and by President Jimmy Carter to the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year.

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