James Baldwin

Terry Gross interviews 13 acclaimed writers.

This modern classic is "a tough, tender, bitter novel of a black girl struggling towards womanhood" in 1930s Harlem—with a foreword by James Baldwin (Publishers Weekly). Depression-era Harlem is home for twelve-year-old Francie Coffin and her family, and it's both a place of refuge and the source of untold dangers for her and her poor, working class family. The beloved "daddy" of the title indeed becomes a number runner when he is unable to find...

Collects forty short stories published between 1915 and 2015, from writers that include Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Alice Munro that exemplify their era and stand the test of time.

Target: St. Louis: Post Hiroshima, the United States Army, eager for new ways to weaponize atomic power, engaged in a series of classified open-air studies designed to test the effects of aerosol radiation in a metropolitan setting. At first the tests were described as defensive, the latest strategy against the threat of Russian bombers. But as later declassified documents suggest, the goal of the testing (performed primarily in low-income and African-American...

Various themes and styles are represented in this anthology of comic and tragic works by Black American playwrights.

This anthology of black writers traces the evolution of African-American perspectives throughout American history, from the early years of slavery to the end of the twentieth century. The essays, manifestos, interviews, and documents assembled here, contextualized with critical commentaries from Marable and Mullings, introduce the reader to the character and important controversies of each period of black history. The selections represent a broad...