This Black History Month we are celebrating Black authors that have made their mark in the literary space. We all know that words have power, and the following 10 Black authors have made history with theirs. These poets, playwrights, novelists, and scholars, have used their words to help capture the voice of a nation and inspire change. While experiencing racism and violence, they turned their pain and fear into art, and still found room to write about joy, love, and music in the midst of unjust circumstances. We honor these authors and their impact on literature and the world.
Here are 10 Black Authors That Made History With Their Words!
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston is a famed anthropologist, folklorist, civil rights activist, and author known for her contribution to Harlem Renaissance. She graduated from the high school of Morgan State University in 1918 and then attended Howard University where she earned her associate’s degree in 1920. In 1925, she was offered a scholarship to Barnard College in New York City, where she was the college’s only black student. She earned her BA in anthropology in 1928 at the age of 37 and spent two years studying anthropology at Columbia University. After receiving funding from the Guggenheim Foundation for travel and studies in anthropology and ethnography, she traveled in 1936 and 1937 to Jamaica and Haiti for research. Her research inspired some of her most famous works, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Jamaica and Haiti (1938) and the renowned novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Hurston’s work was not explicitly about Black people in the context of white America but instead celebrated the culture and traditions of African Americans in the rural South.
Notable Works: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Every Tongue Got to Confess, Mules and Men, You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays
Maya Angelou
Renowned author, actress, screenwriter, dancer, poet, and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou is known for her numerous poetry and essay collections. She made literary history with her first autobiographical work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, becoming the first African-American author with a nonfiction best-seller. Throughout her five-decade-long career, she received many accomplishments including, two NAACP Image Awards in 2005 and 2009, a Grammy award for her poem “Phenomenal Woman” in 1995, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for writing and scoring the 1972 film Georgia, Georgia, which made her the first Black woman to write a screenplay for a major film release. In 1993 Angelou recited her poem, “On the Pulse of Morning” for President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, making her the first female inaugural poet in U.S. presidential history. Angelou has received more than 30 honorary degrees and has been inducted into the Wake Forest University Hall of Fame for Writers. In 2010 President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United State’s highest civilian honor.
Notable Works: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Heart of a Woman, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, “Phenomenal Woman,” “And Still I Rise,”
James Baldwin
James Baldwin was an essayist, novelist, and playwright known for his passionate literary work exploring the Black struggle as well as sexuality in 20th-century America. At age 24, he left to live in Paris and wrote one of his most famous works, Go Tell it on the Mountain which was published in 1953 and received acclaim for his insights on race, spirituality, and humanity. In 1956, he published Giovanni’s Room, which raised the issues of race and homosexuality at a time when it was taboo. Baldwin’s honest portrayal of his personal experiences as an openly gay Black man in white America helped to raise public awareness of racial and sexual oppression.
Notable Works: Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, Just Above My Head
Alex Haley
Alex Haley was an iconic writer best known for The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Roots. Haley began his writing career freelancing after serving in the U.S. Coast Guard for two decades. His big break came when he started writing a series of interviews with prominent African Americans for Playboy magazine, which eventually led him to meet Malcolm X and ask permission to write his biography. The Autobiography of Malcolm X became an international bestseller and is recognized as a classic of African American literature. In 1976, he published the groundbreaking novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family which chronicled his family’s journey from being free in The Gambia to being enslaved in the South. The novel was later turned into miniseries in 1977, that became some of television’s most widely viewed programs to date.
Notable Works: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison was a 20th-century African-American lecturer, critic, scholar, and author best known for his acclaimed novel Invisible Man. Invisible Man was his first novel and won the National Book Award in 1953, as well as ranked 19th in the Top 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century by the Modern Library Association. Published in 1952, the existential novel resonated with many African Americans as it tells the story of a young Black man from the south who upon his move to New York, becomes increasingly alienated due to the racism he encounters. After the success of Invisible Man, Ellison published only two collections of essays: Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). He also lectured widely on Black culture, folklore, and creative writing and taught at various American colleges and universities.
Notable Works: Invisible Man, Shadow and Act, Going to the Territory, Juneteenth (published posthumously), Flying Home (published posthumously)
Richard Wright
Richard Wright was a pioneering novelist and short-story writer who was among the first African-American writers to protest against the white treatment of Black people, primarily in his most famous works, Native Son and Black Boy. Wright first received critical acclaim in 1938 for his famous four-part series, Uncle Tom’s Children, which earned him a $500 prize from Story magazine and led to a 1939 Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1940, he became a household name with the publication of Native Son, which became the first book by an African American writer to be selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. The book was a bestseller and later became a Broadway stageplay in 1941, and then a film in 1951, in which Wright himself later played the title role. His autobiography, Black Boy was published in 1945 and was a personal account of his childhood growing up in the South and the racial violence he experienced and witnessed.
Notable Works: Native Son, Black Boy, Uncle Tom’s Children, The Man Who Lived Underground, The Outsider, The Long Dream, White Man, Listen!
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes was a prolific writer whose poems, columns, novels, and plays made him one of the most instrumental authors of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes was one of the first to use jazz rhythms in his works, becoming an early innovator of the literary art form ‘jazz poetry.’ The African-American experience was the subject of many of his writings, including his 1925 poem ‘Weary Blues,’ which was awarded Opportunity magazine’s prize for best poem of the year. In 1930 his first novel Not Without Laughter was published, which earned him a Harmon Gold Medal for Literature.
Notable Works: “Dream Variation,” “Harlem,” Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond,
Not Without Laughter
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist known for her works highlighting the African-American female experience. She attended Howard University and Cornell University. After teaching at Texas Southern University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964. Morrison began her writing career after being a fiction editor at Random House for a number of years. Her best-known works include The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987). Song of Solomon became the first work by an African-American author since Native Son by Richard Wright to be a featured selection in the Book-of-the-Month Club and Beloved won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The famed author has received numerous honors, including a Nobel Prize, the American Book Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Notable works: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, A Mercy.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks was a postwar poet best known as the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize for her 1949 book Annie Allen. Brooks grew up in Chicago and wrote about everyday urban life. She published her first poem in a children’s magazine at age 13 and by age 16, she had published approximately 75 poems. She regularly contributed to the Chicago Defender, her local African-American newspaper, and achieved national fame for her 1945 collection A Street in Bronzeville. In addition to being the first African-American to win the Pulitzer, Brooks was the first African-American woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the first African-American woman to serve as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress.
Notable works: Annie Allen, A Street in Bronzeville The Bean Eaters, Selected Poems, In the Mecca, Report from Part One, “Boy Breaking Glass,” “Malcolm X,” “We Real Cool”
Claude McKay
Claude McKay was a Jamaican poet best known for his novels and poems, including “If We Must Die,” which contributed to the Harlem Renaissance. In 1912, McKay moved to the U.S. after publishing two collections of verse in the Jamaican dialect titled Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. He used award money from the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences to move and began his studies at Tuskegee University and Kansas State College. In 1914, he moved to Harlem, where he became an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance movement. He is known for his novels, essays, and poems, including “Harlem Shadows” and “If We Must Die,” which threatened retaliation for racial prejudice and abuse. Many of his poems appeared in Pearson’s Magazine and the radical magazine Liberator.
Notable Works: Home to Harlem, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, Banjo and Banana Bottom, Long Way from Home, “If We Must Die,” “Harlem Shadows.”
