Valerie Smith surveys the development of black American literature from the 1890s to the 1930s, examining the achievements of the authors who consolidated the Afro-American literary tradition at the turn of the century, notably Charles Chestnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar and the major poets and novelists of the Harlem Renaissance, such as James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Additionally, she discusses black women writers like Nellie Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston who provide a unique, double perspective on racial and sexual oppression in their work during the 1920s and 1930s. produced by Manly, Inc.