A collection of thirty-four critical and biographical essays on African-American writers, ranging from slave narratives to contemporary feminist authors, each including a selected bibliography.

This newest volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography adds 34 important black writers. Besides such well-known names as Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson, there are others less familiar such as Jessie R. Fauset and Willis Richardson. Each sketch is lively, well researched and candid, and consists of three parts: a checklist of the author's work, a 6-to-12 page essay, and a brief bibliography of secondary sources. Well-chosen...