African American literature

The advent of urban realism

Despite the enormous outpouring of creativity during the 1920s, the vogue of black writing, black art, and black culture waned markedly in the early 1930s as the Great Depression took hold in the United States. African American pundits in the 1930s and '40s tended to depreciate the achievements of the New Negroes, calling instead for a more politically engaged, socially critical realism in literature.

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  Introduction
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  Antebellum literature
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    Slave narratives
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    Prose, drama, and poetry
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    Oral tradition
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  The Civil War and Reconstruction
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  The late 19th and early 20th centuries
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    Paul Laurence Dunbar
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    The novel as social analysis
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    Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois
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    The rise of the New Negro
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  The Harlem Renaissance
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    Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen
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    Novelists
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    Playwrights and editors
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  The advent of urban realism
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    Richard Wright
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    Chicago writers
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    The 1940s
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    Ralph Ellison
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    James Baldwin
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  African American theatre
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  The literature of civil rights
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    Amiri Baraka
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    The Black Arts movement
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  Reconceptualizing Blackness
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  Renaissance in the 1970s
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    Toni Morrison
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    Alice Walker
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  The turn of the 21st century
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    August Wilson
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    African American roots
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  Additional Reading