by Ellen Douglas
Hands down my favorite book of the semester so far, and likely to remain so. I can’t decide if I’m just incredibly lucky that I picked this one to write about for my short paper, or if I like it so much at least partially because writing about it made me read it [...]
by Ernest Gaines
It’s the mid-1960s, but in the rural Southern setting of this novel, the remnants of slavery are still evident; the aging white landowners occupy the plantation house, while the ten or fifteen black families live down in the old quarters. Racial issues come to the fore, but are anything but cut and dried, [...]
by Eugene O’Neill
I…didn’t really know what to make of this play upon reading it, and I’m still not sure. Jones is a black man from United States who goes to an island in the Caribbean and convinces the native Negro inhabitants to make him their Emperor. The action of the play concerns Jones’s attempt to [...]
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 [...]
by Rebecca Gilman
A small college in New Hampshire, largely white in faculty and student body, is thrown into turmoil when a black student begins receiving threats and hate mail. The main character is the Dean of Students, who came to New Hampshire after working at a largely black institution in Chicago, so a lot of [...]
