A foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, by one of the nation's major literary critics

Distilled over many years from…

An affordable, compact primer on the artist who drastically shifted the course of late 20th-century art

This reader provides a concise introduction to the widely popular yet oft-misunderstood artist Jean-Michel…

This full-length biography explores the multifaceted-and altogether fascinating-life, opinions, and accomplishments of African American scholar and writer Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: A Biography is the first…

A leading Black scholar interviews famous African Americans, including Colin Powell, Louis Farrakhan, and Harry Belafonte, exploring their views on America and the significance of their lives in terms of…

More than one hundred years after its first publication in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk remains possibly the most important book ever penned by a black American. This collection…

Black Reconstruction in America interprets the twenty years of Reconstruction from the point of view of newly liberated African Americans. Though lambasted by critics at the time of its publication…

The second book in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Flame trilogy, Mansart Builds a School, opens with Mansart’s election to superintendent of Negro schools in Atlanta and follows him…

The slave Phillis Wheatley literally wrote her way to freedom when, in 1773, she became the first person of African descent to publish a book of poems in the English…