African American Writers

Introduction

Who said the classics were all written by dead white males? In the last two hundred years, black writers have contributed some of the most spirited and important works to American literature. These range from early narratives depicting slavery to modern works dealing with the lingering effects of slavery, racism and apartheid. In this paper we compare and contrast three African American writers Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, and Amiri Baraka.

Compare and Contrast

The African American novelist who has won the largest number of prestigious awards for her work to date is Toni Morrison. The epic power of her prose and her unerring ear for dialogue, her poetically charged depictions of Black America, have garnered her Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in 1993 (www.kirjasto.sci.fi). Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), about a small Black girl who thinks all her problems would be solved if only she could have blue eyes, broke with the tradition of straight chronological narrative still in vogue. Her second novel, Sula (1973), was followed by Song of Solomon (1977), a family chronicle. Tar Baby (1981), which focuses on the theme of racial identity, among others, was followed by Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), and Beloved (1987), based on the life of Margaret Garner, an escaped Southern slave who killed her daughter rather than see her returned to slavery. Morrison also wrote the libretto of an opera, Margaret Garner, based on her book. (Oprah Winfrey's film production company turned it into a movie.) Her novel, Love, appeared in 2003 (www.kirjasto.sci.fi).

While Ishmael Reed (1938), together with Toni Morrison, is one of today's preeminent African American literary figures, perhaps the most widely reviewed since Ralph Ellison. Reed's style is best known for his use of parody and satire as a means of challenging literary conventions. It also contains an unabashed awareness of Blackness and mythic archetypes. The first stanza of his poem, “Jacket Notes,” reads: “Being a colored poet / Is like going over / Niagara Falls in a / Barrel.” Since the publication of his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), Reed has used his considerable gift for parody and satire to challenge the formal conventions of literary tradition on the one hand, and American political and religious repression on the other. The racism and greed of the Reagan era is the target of The Terrible Twos (1982) and Japanese by Spring ...