The Great Poems by African American Writers

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. Phillis Wheatley To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth On Virtue An Hymn To the Morning An Hymn To the Evening Frances E. W. Harper Bury Me in a Free Land Songs for the People My Mother's Kiss A Grain of Sand Our Hero The Sparrow's Fall James Weldon Johnson Sence You Went Away Paul Laurence Dunbar The Lesson Sympathy We Wear the Mask Claude McKay After the Winter If We Must Die The Tropics in New York Countee Cullen For Paul Laurence Dunbar Incident Langston Hughes The Weary Blues Jazzonia Negro Dancers The Cat And The Saxophone (2 A. M.) Young Singer Cabaret To Midnight Nan At Leroy'S To A Little Lover-Lass, Dead Harlem Night Club Nude Young Dancer Young Prostitute To A Black Dancer In "The Little Savoy" Song For A Banjo Dance Blues Fantasy Lenox Avenue: Midnight