Poet, playwright, and short-fiction writer Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877-1966) was a central figure in the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Her Washington literary salon, the Round Table, was frequented by such artists and intellectuals as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Countee Cullen, and Angelina Weld Grimke. This volume collects some of Johnson's most important work: four volumes of poetry (including The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems); four short stories (one never before published); eight plays (two never before published); and previously unpublished poems from her private papers. In addition, Claudia Tate's revealing introduction offers newly discovered information on Johnson's life and work.

This volume includes three stories and thirteen poems and the first publication of Gordon's theses, "The status of the Negro woman in the United States from 1619-1865."

African American women writers published extensively during the Harlem Renaissance and have been extraordinarily prolific since the 1970s. This book surveys the world of African American women writers. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on more than 150 novelists, poets, playwrights, short fiction writers, autobiographers, essayists, and influential scholars. The Encyclopedia covers established contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, along with a range of neglected and emerging figures. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a brief biography, a discussion of major works, a survey of the author's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies. Literature students will value this book for its exploration of African American literature, while social studies students will appreciate its examination of social issues through literature. African American women writers have made an enormous contribution to our culture. Many of these authors wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, a particularly vital time in African American arts and letters, while others have been especially active since the 1970s, an era in which works by African American women are adapted into films and are widely read in book clubs. Literature by African American women is important for its aesthetic qualities, and it also illuminates the social issues which these authors have confronted. This book conveniently surveys the lives and works of African American women writers. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on more than 150 African American women novelists, poets, playwrights, short fiction writers, autobiographers, essayists, and influential scholars. Some of these figures, such as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, are among the most popular authors writing today, while others have been largely neglected or are recently emerging. Each entry provides a biography, a discussion of major works, a survey of the writer's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies. The Encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students and general readers will welcome this guide to the rich achievement of African American women. Literature students will value its exploration of the works of these writers, while social studies students will appreciate its examination of the social issues these women confront in their works.

Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was a forceful leader in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the movements for civil rights, women's rights, and world peace. As Nellie Y. McKay states in her introduction to Terrell's 1940 autobiography, she was a "quintessential race woman who fully met W. E. B. Du Bois's standards for the Talented Tenth, as well as those of the black club women's 'lifting as we climb' ideal". A fascinating and highly readable memoir, A Colored Woman in a White World documents Terrell's childhood, education, and her very significant contributions to social reform in the United States.

This oral history portrays the lives of African American women who migrated from the rural South to work as domestic servants in Washington, DC in the early decades of the twentieth century. In Living In, Living Out Elizabeth Clark-Lewis narrates the personal experiences of eighty-one women who worked for wealthy white families. These women describe how they encountered—but never accepted—the master-servant relationship, and recount their struggles to change their status from “live in” servants to daily paid workers who “lived out.” With candor and passion, the women interviewed tell of leaving their families and adjusting to city life “up North,” of being placed as live-in servants, and of the frustrations and indignities they endured as domestics. By networking on the job, at churches, and at penny savers clubs, they found ways to transform their unending servitude into an employer-employee relationship—gaining a new independence that could only be experienced by living outside of their employers' homes. Clark-Lewis points out that their perseverance and courage not only improved their own lot but also transformed work life for succeeding generations of African American women. A series of in-depth vignettes about the later years of these women bears poignant witness to their efforts to carve out lives of fulfillment and dignity.

"Tragedies of life" is a narrative fiction and drama in three acts. It is a tale of an Afro-American family's journey from slavery to freedom, and the complex consequences and twists of fate, struggle, and sacrifice that complicate upward mobility.

"Both writers from the pre-Harlem Renaissance era, Carrie Williams Clifford (1862-1934) and Carrie Law Morgan Figgs (1878-1968) were teachers and community leaders who saw in poetry a means of addressing racial concerns and promoting the betterment of the black race. The poems in Clifford's Race Rhymes (1911) and The Widening Light (1922) and Figgs's Poetic Pearls (1920) and Nuggets of Gold (1921) cover such issues as the Jim Crow laws, military and social contributions of African Americans, Christian ideals, and the injustice of racial prejudice. This collection also includes Figgs's Select Plays (1923)."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved