Skip to Main Content

African American Studies — Home Page

Primary and selected secondary sources for research in African American Studies at Princeton University.

Articles and literary works

African American Poetry Database  (1750-1900)  

Contains nearly 3,000 poems by African-American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

African-American Poetry, Twentieth Century    

Full-text access to about 10,000 poems from around 70 20th century African American poets.

Black Drama  (1850+)  

Full text of plays written by dramatists from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, and detailed information about productions, theaters, production companies, and other ephemera related to the plays.

Black Short Fiction    

Full text of 760 stories and folktales by African, African American, and Caribbean authors.

Black Thought and Culture    

Full-text collection of published non-fiction works is included, as well as interviews, journal articles, letters, and other materials of leading African-Americans. Biographical essays by leading scholars and an annotated bibliography of the sources in the database are also featured.

Black Women Writers  

Works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by women from North America, Africa and the Caribbean.

 Literature Criticism Online

Provides full text of biographies, bibliographies, literary criticism, and other resources on authors of all categories and eras.

Essay and General Literature Index  (1900+)  

Access to essays and articles published in collections, with emphasis on works in the humanities and social sciences.

LION: Literature Online    

Full text of more than 350,000 works of English and American literature and poetry, fiction, drama, from the seventeenth century to the present, as well as works of literary theory from Plato to the present.

Literature Criticism Online    

Covers authors and their works across regions, eras, and genres. Includes biographical and critical overviews, and many interviews of authors. Contains the full text of volumes in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Literature Criticism 1400-1800, Shakespeare Criticism, Classical & Medieval Literature Criticism, and Drama Criticism.

Literature Compass  (2004+)  

Peer reviewed survey articles in literature.

Literature Resource Center    

Provides full text of biographies, bibliographies, literary criticism, and other resources on authors of all categories and eras.

MLA International Bibliography  (1926+)

Provides citations to articles, books, book chapters, and dissertations on all aspects of modern literature, language, and linguistics.

Black Literature, 1827-1940

Black Literature, 1827-1940.  

Contains fiction, poetry, book reviews, and literary notices originally published in 900 black periodicals and newspapers.

Primary sources

The Papers of Amiri Baraka, Poet Laureate of the Black Power Movement

This collection of Amiri Baraka materials was made available by Dr. Komozi Woodard. Dr. Woodard collected these documents during his career as an activist in Newark, New Jersey.The collection consists of rare works of poetry, organizational records, print publications, over one hundred articles, poems, plays, and speeches by Baraka, a small amount of personal correspondence, and oral histories. The collection has been arranged into eighteen series. These series are: (1) Black Arts Movement; (2) Black Nationalism; (3) Correspondence; (4) Newark (New Jersey); (5) Congress of African People; (6) National Black Conferences and National Black Assembly; (7) Black Women’s United Front; (8) Student Organization for Black Unity; (9) African Liberation Support Committee; (10) Revolutionary Communist League; (11) African Socialism; (12) Black Marxists; (13) National Black United Front; (14) Miscellaneous Materials, 1978-1988; (15) Serial Publications; (16) Oral Histories; (17) Woodard’s Office Files.

 Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress

"This collection present ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited as unpublished typescripts in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until a manuscript curator rediscovered them in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997. The plays reflect Hurston's life experience, travels, and research, especially her knowledge of folklore in the African-American South. Totaling 1,068 images, most of the scripts are housed in the Library's Manuscript Division with one each in the Music and in the Rare Book and Special Collections Divisions. There are four sketches and six full length plays in this group. Previously known mainly for her fiction and autobiography, Hurston here reveals her high ambitions as a dramatist."