African American Fiction: A Digital Anthology (Home)
The texts here are linked to our Open Access Literature Corpus, where they are all available in TXT file format.
The goal of the present Scalar project is to present all 92 novels in our literature corpus, along with short fiction published in periodicals throughout the period. We'll also include relevant nonfiction essays that might be important to researchers working on these topics.
The short stories are an area of particular interest, as many of these were published in periodicals by writers at the time and never formally collected. Some have appeared in various "Harlem Renaissance" anthologies in subsequent years. We'll be steadily adding short stories to the collection over the course of 2025.
A list of the works we're aiming to include can be found here.
Our long-term goal is to present clean versions of each text with annotations, summaries, author biographies, and various thematic tags to indicate groupings (for instance: the "tragic mulatto" trope; travel and adventure narratives; passing narratives; racialized violence, etc).
This site is a sister project to African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology.