African American literature

African American literature is literature written by, usually about, and sometimes specifically for African Americans.

African American literature has a particularly strong tradition of oral poetry, often as lyrics to songs. Examples over the centuries include spirituals, African American gospel music, blues and rap. Parallel to this is a specifically African American tradition of Christian sermons, quite distinct at many points in history from the sermons of other American Christian churches, although with influences occurring in both directions.

Among the earliest prose African American literature were slave narratives; these were generally targetted to a broader American audience rather than to a specifically African American audience. This was the start of a continuing tradition of prose writing by African Americans about specifically African American issues, which continued after the emancipation of the African American slaves with scholarly writers such as W.E.B. DuBois. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is also heir to this tradition, and to traditions of African American oral literature including sermons: Malcolm X was a Muslim, but his preaching style, reflected in this book, was firmly rooted in an African American tradition that had grown up in Christianity.

African Americans have contributed work to virtually every genre of American writing. The Harlem Renaissance brought attention to novelists such as novelist Zora Neale Hurston and poet Richard Wright. It established a tradition against which later writers like Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and (still later) James Baldwin could react. In last few decades, female African American novelists have been particularly prominent, for example Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature. Other African Americans have created a specifically African American approach to genre fiction, such as the crime novels of Walter Mosley.

African American talk show host Oprah Winfrey has repeatedly leveraged her fame to encourage literacy, especially through the medium of Oprah's Book Club. At times, she has brought African American writers (such as Alice Walker) a far broader audience than they might otherwise have received.

Writing by African Americans that is neither about African American characters and situations nor particularly targeted at an African American audience may be considered African American literature as well; an example of a writer some of whose work might be controversial with respect to this classification is the outspokenly gay science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany.

See also

• List of African-American writers