August Wilson

The most accomplished of all African American dramatists in the last half of the 20th century, August Wilson, a high-school dropout and Black Power activist in the 1960s, opened his first major play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, on Broadway in 1984 with great critical and commercial success. The first of Wilson’s “20th-century cycle,” a series of plays designed to treat African American life in every decade of the past century, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which concerns blues musicians during the 1920s, was followed by Fences (produced 1985), which delineates a father-son conflict in a working-class family of the 1950s; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (produced 1986), about a displaced Southern Black man’s quest for his wife in 1911 Pittsburgh; The Piano Lesson (produced 1987), in which competing ideas about their legacy threatens to rupture an African American family in the 1930s; and Two Trains Running (produced 1990), a look at the Black Power ideals of the 1960s from the perspective of the late 1980s. Fences and The Piano Lesson both won the Pulitzer Prize. Wilson’s later plays, Seven Guitars (produced 1995), Jitney! (produced in 1982 and revived in 1996), King Hedley II (produced 1999), and Gem of the Ocean (produced 2003), excited the admiration of critics and viewers as much as his earlier plays.

African American roots

The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).

Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada (1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning ideas about self and race. The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and, with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).

In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the “word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.

Nonfiction and journalism

In the 21st century a new generation of Black writers emerged who explored many of the same themes as their predecessors but used new mediums and formats made possible through the Internet. Ta-Nehisi Coates began writing for print and online publications, but his career took off when he began blogging for The Atlantic’s website in 2008. Coates combined fresh insights on pop culture with piercing analysis on American race relations. In particular, his 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations” rekindled a national debate on reparations for slavery. With his nonfiction book Between the World and Me (2015), which was written in the form of a letter to his teenage son and argued compellingly that the United States is structured on white supremacy, Coates earned himself comparisons to James Baldwin.

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Like Coates, Roxane Gay adeptly used new media formats to reach a wider audience. She shared personal insights on a Tumblr blog and built up a large following on social media as she began publishing short stories and essays and serving as an editor for print and digital literary journals. Gay’s breakthrough was Bad Feminist (2014), a best-selling collection of essays on the often-problematic clashes between feminism and pop culture. After the runaway success of Bad Feminist, Gay published more fiction, edited anthologies, wrote an opinion column for The New York Times, and cohosted a podcast. In 2016 Gay and writer Yona Harvey became the first Black women to write for Marvel Comics, when they began collaborating with Coates and artists Afua Richardson and Alitha E. Martinez on Black Panther: World of Wakanda.

Championing overlooked or underreported stories of African American history was the basis of the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, whose best-selling book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010) used interviews and oral histories to shed light on the widespread migration of African Americans in the 20th century from the South to cities in the North and the West. In 2020 Wilkerson published another groundbreaking work, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which draws connections between systemic racism and injustice in the United States, the genocidal ideology of Nazi Germany, and the caste system that persists in India.

Fiction

In fiction, novelist Colson Whitehead was the first writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for consecutive books: The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019). The first of the two novels was a neo-slave narrative that reimagined a form that had already been well deconstructed in the late 20th century by Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison. Blending elements of fantasy with the real-life histories of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, The Underground Railroad tells the story of an enslaved girl who has escaped along the tracks of a secret railroad situated underground—a literal rendering of the Underground Railroad—and is pursued by a slave catcher. Other novelists who contributed masterful, award-winning works of historical fiction in the 21st century include James McBride, Percival Everett, Edwidge Danticat, and Marlon James. In 2022 Jesmyn Ward, a memoirist and novelist who won two National Book Awards (in 2011 and 2017) for works of fiction centering on young African Americans living in the Mississippi Gulf Coast, turned to historical fiction in her novel Let Us Descend. In Ward’s characteristically lyrical prose, she gives voice to a young girl before the American Civil War who has been sold by the white enslaver who fathered her and sent to live on a sugar plantation in Louisiana.

The popularity of Black writers of contemporary fiction was aided in part by Oprah Winfrey, whose enormously popular book club continued to guarantee the success of the books and authors she highlighted, such as Tayari Jones, an Atlanta-based writer whose fourth novel, An American Marriage (2018)—an intimate portrait of a successful young couple whose relationship is tested when the husband is convicted of a crime he did not commit—was featured by Winfrey and included in a year-end list of favorite reads by former U.S. president Barack Obama. In science fiction, N.K. Jemisin, whose work explores issues such as racism and the climate crisis, became the first Black writer to win a Hugo Award for a novel, for The Fifth Season (2015). In young adult literature, Angie Thomas rocketed to the top of bestseller lists with her debut novel, The Hate U Give (2017), a powerful story about a teenage girl who must navigate between the different social codes of her poor Black neighborhood and her wealthy, mostly white private school. The novel confronted timely issues such as privilege and police brutality.

Drama and poetry

A number of Black dramatists picked up the mantle that had been carved out by August Wilson. James Ijames, Katori Hall, Lynn Nottage, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Michael R. Jackson all won Pulitzer Prizes for drama in the 21st century, offering plays that address themes such as Black identity and kinship, masculinity, sexuality, prejudice, war, and the illusion of the American Dream. In poetry, numerous Black poets emerged whose work garnered popular fame as well as critical acclaim. Danez Smith, Claudia Rankine, Kevin Young, Clint Smith, Ross Gay, Patricia Smith, and Hanif Abdurraqib were among those who produced stunning collections that explore universal themes such as grief, family, and love, along with searingly intimate meditations on topics including racial microaggressions, gender identity, and police violence. The Pulitzer committee awarded several Black poets the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in the early 21st century, including Natasha Trethewey (U.S. poet laureate 2012–14), Tracy K. Smith (U.S. poet laureate 2017–19), Gregory Pardlo, Tyehimba Jess, and Jericho Brown. In addition, Elizabeth Alexander and Amanda Gorman joined the small number of poets, which have included Robert Frost and Maya Angelou, who were invited to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration, in 2009 and 2021, respectively.