It’s the birthday of Terry McMillan (b. 1951), who is best known for her fantastically popular novels Waiting to Exhale (1992; film 1995) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996; film 1998) and is credited with teaching the publishing world that there is a huge market of middle-class professional black female readers. McMillan was [...]
It’s the birthday of James Alan McPherson (1943-2016), the first black author to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and a member of the first cohort to receive a MacArthur “genius grant.” McPherson was born in Savannah, Georgia. His mother was a maid, and his father became the first black master electrician in the state, [...]
It’s the birthday of Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), a member of the Harlem Renaissance who is best known today for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and the good news is that if you have always wanted to read a description of what untreated rabies does to a human being, then look no [...]
It’s the birthday of Richard Wright (1908-1960), whose novel Native Son (1940) was one of the first major novels by a black author to protest racism and thus established Wright as the father of black American literature (though James Baldwin would take issue with that). Native Son was also both the first bestseller and the [...]