Five African American classics are or should be added to high school curriculums across the nation… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!
Native Son
by Richard Wright
Kindle price: $11.99
Now an HBO Film!
“If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son.” – Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.
Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright’s powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
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![A Lesson Before Dying: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by [Gaines, Ernest J.]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51jLdHgHPEL.jpg)
A Lesson Before Dying: A Novel
by Ernest J. Gaines
Kindle price: $9.99
“This majestic, moving novel is an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives.”—Chicago Tribune
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, A Lesson Before Dying is a deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a black youth on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.
From the critically acclaimed author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.
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![Go Tell It on the Mountain (Vintage International) by [Baldwin, James]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51LQZljtl6L.jpg)
Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
Kindle price: $6.99
“Mountain,” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
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![Passing by [Larsen, Nella]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51CnnkEAcRL.jpg)
Passing
by Nella Larsen
Kindle price: 99 cents
Generally regarded as Nella Larsen’s best work, Passing was first published in 1929 but has received a lot of renewed attention because of its close examination of racial and sexual ambiguities. It has achieved canonical status in many American universities.
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Moses, Man of the Mountain
by Zora Neale Hurston
Kindle price: $7.99
In this 1939 novel based on the familiar story of the Exodus, Zora Neale Hurston blends the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black folklore and song to create a compelling allegory of power, redemption, and faith. Narrated in a mixture of biblical rhetoric, black dialect, and colloquial English, Hurston traces Moses’s life from the day he is launched into the Nile river in a reed basket, to his development as a great magician, to his transformation into the heroic rebel leader, the Great Emancipator. From his dramatic confrontations with Pharaoh to his fragile negotiations with the wary Hebrews, this very human story is told with great humor, passion, and psychological insight—the hallmarks of Hurston as a writer and champion of black culture.
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– Learn More![My Happy Day by [Wilson, Dee]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41r5-6Hs21L.jpg)
