African American Literature

This guide includes a digital collection of published works by 19th-century black women writers, biographies for each author, citations and much more.

North American Slave Narratives collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of Black people struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of self-emancipated and formerly enslaved people published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of self-emancipated and formerly enslaved people and some significant fictionalized first-person accounts of enslavement published in English before 1920.

Classic as well as contemporary works for further reading. They maintain a curated and growing collection of books covering a century of Black literature.