Here’s how a book can be initially misunderstood and ignored, then gain literary recognition and acclaim, become adopted by the education system and taught broadly, and then become banned.
The story of Richard Wright’s Native Son, the first black American best-seller, a novel that is both a shocking page-turner, and a philosophical provocation stirring controversy to this day.
Here’s how high school students at a school in Maryland responded to Toni Morrison’s the Seven Days from Song of Solomon.
Here’s the story of how Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man became a defining midcentury Black novel.
College students at one university have expressed a range of feelings about the many new words that they encounter when reading Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist.
Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout became the first novel by an American to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2016.
A brief discussion of the prolific scholarship on African American novels by scholar Trudier Harris.
The stories behind the reception to Larsen’s novel.
What can we learn about the differences among the eleven novels Toni Morrison published when we consider her word usage?
A fresh conceptual framework emerges that gives us tools to discover unique ways to engage with classic novels, like Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.