The first of four novels Zora Neale Hurston wrote, and my least favorite of the four. Hurston had sort of a strained relationship with her African-American contemporaries. She was a very good and fairly popular writer among whites as well as blacks, but she was also an anthropologist and a proponent of Negro folk culture, [...]
by Nella Larsen
“Passing” refers to a member of one race successfully pretending to be of a different race. Claire is a very light-skinned woman with black ancestry who passes as white to the extent of marrying a white bigot and he never knows the difference. Her childhood friend Irene is too dark to physically pass, [...]
by Nella Larsen
Helga leaves the black school where she teaches because the administration doesn’t put any value on being African American, but tries to emulate white culture as much as possible. Her subsequent travels take her to Chicago, New York, and even Denmark for a while (her mother was Danish), and then back to the [...]
by Jessie Fauset
Jessie Fauset was one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, her home being a major meeting-place for the African American writers and artists of the 1920s…sort of like the 19th century Parisian salons. She also wrote a novel or two, including this one. It’s really interesting for its insight into an upper-middle-class [...]
by James Weldon Johnson
This is not, despite the title, an autobiography. It is fiction. Interestingly, Johnson originally published it in 1912 anonymously, leading many people to think it was an actual autobiography of a biracial man passing as white. It’s still powerful, though, even when you know it’s not true–in fact, it adds a level [...]
