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

  • A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.

  • An award-winning historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America.

  • An inspiring story about what happens when 3,500 acres of land, farmed for centuries, is left to return to the wild.

  • George Willard is a young reporter on the Winesburg Eagle to whom, one by one, the inhabitants of Winesburg, Ohio, confide their hopes, their dreams, and their fears. This town of friendly but solitary people comes to life as Anderson’s special talent exposes the emotional undercurrents that bind its people together. In this timeless cycle of short stories, he lays bare the life of a small town in the American Midwest.