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What Do I Read Next?
(Short Stories for Students)
Toni Cade Bambara's Gorilla, My Love collects fifteen stories written between 1959 and 1972. Many of the stories have a child narrator, as does ‘‘The Lesson,’’ and they raise issues significant to the African-American community.
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968), edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, collects creative works that are part of the Black Aesthetic Movement.
Madhubuti's verse collection Don't Cry, Scream (1969) is representative of poetry produced during the Black Aesthetic Movement. His work is characterized by use of dialect and slang and the author's anger at social and economic injustice as well as his joy in African-American culture.
The play Dutchman (1964), by Amiri Baraka, is one of the writer's most well-known works. It illustrates the hatred between African Americans and white Americans through the chance encounter of a middle-class African-American man and a white woman. It also explores the political and psychological conflicts facing the African-American man in the 1960s.
The Black Woman (1970), edited by Toni Cade Bambara, is a collection of poetry, short stories, and essays by well-known African-American women writers. It was the first anthology of its kind published in the United States.
James Baldwin's essay book, The Fire Next Time (1963), warned white Americans of the violence that would result if attitudes and policies towards African Americans did not change. The first essay attacks the notion of African-American inferiority, and the second essay recounts Baldwin's coming-of-age in Harlem and his involvement with the Black Power movement.
Kaye Gibbon's novel Ellen Foster is told from the point of view of the child narrator. Ellen, a young, impoverished southern girl, grows up in an abusive home. This brief yet powerful novel chronicles her attempts to find a real family.