African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands.

Phillis Wheatley

To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth

On Virtue

An Hymn To the Morning

An Hymn To the Evening

Frances E. W. Harper

Bury Me in a Free Land

Songs for the People

My Mother's Kiss

A Grain of Sand

Our Hero

The Sparrow's Fall

James Weldon Johnson

Sence You Went Away


Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Lesson

Sympathy

We Wear the Mask


Claude McKay

After the Winter

If We Must Die

The Tropics in New York



Countee Cullen

For Paul Laurence Dunbar

Incident

Langston Hughes

The Weary Blues

Jazzonia

Negro Dancers

The Cat And The Saxophone (2 A. M.)

Young Singer

Cabaret

To Midnight Nan At Leroy'S

To A Little Lover-Lass, Dead

Harlem Night Club

Nude Young Dancer

Young Prostitute

To A Black Dancer In "The Little Savoy"

Song For A Banjo Dance

Blues Fantasy

Lenox Avenue: Midnight