Black American Writers Bibliographical Essays : Volume 2 Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka

The last two decades have witnessed a great proliferation of scholarship devoted to the history and culture of Afro-Americans. And out of this increasing recognition of the contribution of blacks to the development of this nation has come a significant reassessment of the aesthetic and humanistic achievements of black writers. Black American Writers: Bibliographical Essays is intended as an appraisal of the best biographical and critical writings about America's seminal black writers, as well as an identification of manuscript and special resources for continued study. It is also intended to give an overview of the current state of scholarly recognition of the lives and careers of these authors and an appreciation of their works. The coverage is intentionally selective, both in the figures involved and the material examined in each chapter. Yet we feel that, within our self-imposed chronological limit, no major Afro-American literary figure has been overlooked. Volume 1 covers the early black writers of the eighteenth century, the slave narratives, the early modern writers, the Harlem Renaissance, and Langston Hughes. Volume 2 focuses on four major twentieth-century black writers: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). A bibliographical survey of the great number of black American writers who have come to prominence since Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and Baraka would require another volume or volumes and, given the rich and vigorous production of black writers today and the continual emergence of new figures, would perhaps be premature. Our hope is that the bibliographical essays in these volumes, all by specialists on their topics, will aid and encourage further study of black American writers and literature. Front Matter....Pages i-xi Richard Wright....Pages 1-46 Ralph Ellison....Pages 47-71 James Baldwin....Pages 73-120 Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)....Pages 121-178 Back Matter....Pages 179-187