African American Fiction: A Digital Anthology: Collection of African American fiction, 1850-1929 Main Menu

African American Fiction: A Digital Anthology (Home)

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This site is a collection prose works by African American writers. All texts are in the public domain. 

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. 

 

Contents of this path:

  1. African American Short Stories
  2. Zora Neale Hurston, "John Redding Goes to Sea" (1921)
  3. Jean Toomer, "Cane" (1923)
  4. Jessie Fauset, "There is Confusion" (1924) (full text)
  5. Zora Neale Hurston, "Sweat" (1926)
  6. Walter F. White, "The Fire in the Flint" (1924) (full text)
  7. Harry F. Liscomb, "The Prince of Washington Square" (1925) (full text)
  8. Walter White, "Flight" (1926) (full text)
  9. Eric Walrond, "Tropic Death" (1926) (full tet)
  10. Claude McKay, "Home to Harlem" (full text) (1928)
  11. Nella Larsen, "Quicksand" (1928) (full text)
  12. Wallace Thurman, "The Blacker The Berry" (1929) (full text)
  13. W.E.B. Du Bois, "Dark Princess" (1928) (full text)
  14. Jessie Fauset, "Plum Bun" (1929) (full text)
  15. Rudolph Fisher, "The Walls of Jericho" (1928) (full text)
  16. Jessie Fauset, "Plum Bun" (1929) (full text)
  17. Claude McKay, "Banjo" (Full Text)
  18. Nella Larsen, "Passing" (1929) (full text)
  19. Oscar Micheaux, "The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer" (1913) (full text)
  20. Oscar Micheaux, "The Forged Note" (1915)
  21. Oscar Micheaux, "The Homesteader" (1917) (full text)
  22. James Weldon Johnson, "Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" (1912)
  23. W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Quest of the Silver Fleece" (1911) (full text)
  24. Langston Hughes, "Not Without Laughter" (1930) (full text)
  25. Wallace Thurman, "Infants of the Spring" (1932) (full text)