Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies
American Indian Stories

The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life

The Blacker the Berry (1929), Wallace Thurman’s debut novel, broke new ground as an exploration of issues of “colorism,” intra-racial prejudice, and internalized racism in African American life. Its protagonist, the young Emma Lou Morgan, is simply “too dark” for a world in which every kind of advancement seems to require a light complexion. Seeking acceptance and opportunity, she moves––much like the dark-skinned young Thurman had, four years before the novel’s publication––from Idaho to California to New York. Harlem, the “city of surprises,” is in many ways the novel’s true subject, its low-down, licentious streets, glittering cabarets, and variegated cast of characters offering a rich backdrop for Emma Lou’s ambivalent, picaresque progress.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • Ellen Bryant Voigt takes on a monumental challenge: to conjure up the influenza pandemic of 1918-19.

  • The obstacles to a mixed-race relationship between a son of the nobility and a woman of African ancestry.

  • This is the story of two women who find resistance and freedom in literature.  

  • On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.