Non-Fiction

Contemporary Fiction

African-American

Angelou, Maya

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The first installment of a courageous black woman's candid memoirs of love and anguish.

Baldwin, James

Go Tell It on the Mountain
A powerful saga of sin, suffering and salvation, depicting three generations of an African-American family as seen through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy.

Beals, Melba Patillo

Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High
Beals dramatically recounts how she and eight other students courageously faced mob violence when they became the first African-Americans to attend Central High School in 1957.

Ellison, Ralph

Invisible Man
A symbolic search for identity that takes a black youth from the South to Harlem during the Depression. A haunting and powerful novel.

Gates, Henry Louis

Colored People: A Memoir
Warm memories of extended family and close community infuse this account of growing up "colored" in a West Virginia town during the early days of the civil rights movement.

Hansberry, Lorraine

Raisin in the Sun
Set in Chicago's south side, this realistic drama portrays a Black family's struggle to achieve a better life in a white neighborhood.

Malcolm, X

Autobiography of Malcolm X
The metamorphosis of Malcolm Little into Detroit Red and finally into Malcolm X.

Walker, Alice

The Color Purple
Celie, a poor Black girl in early twentieth century Georgia, overcomes her hardships and grows into a strong woman in this novel.

Wright, Richard

Black Boy
The simple, vivid, and poignant autobiography of a gifted writer growing up in the South during the 1920s.

American Immigrants

Gordon, Mary

The Other Side
This story of a single day in the lives of five generations of an Iris-American family delineates the conflicts of family life with candor and understanding.

Hijuelos, Oscar

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Price for Fiction, Mambo Kings deals with Cuban life in America, and provides an exuberant depiction of Latin music as it was played in New York during the 50's and 60's.

Lopate, Philip

The Rug Merchant
Melancholic Cyrus is an Iranian rug seller who would rather be an art historian and whose mother wants him to marry a nice Zoroastrian girl in Lopate's sensitive portrait of an out-of-step New Yorker.

Mukherjee, Bharati

Jasmine
Through the tale of an East Indian woman's adaption to the United States, one learns what it is to become an American and sees a different America that most people never encounter.

Kingston, Maxine Hong

The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
A young American woman recounts moments and myths from her Chinese heritage in an attempt to reconcile past and present cultures.

Santoli, Al

New Americans, An Oral History: Immigrants and Refugees in the U.S. Today
Eighteen families or individuals provide honest, insightful first-person accounts of what they have left, what they have found here in America, and what they have gained and lost.

Jewish Experience

Frank, Anne

The Diary of a Young Girl
The deeply moving document of a Jewish family hiding from the Nazi regime in Holland.

Howe, Irving

World of Our Fathers
A splendid study of the first generations of the East European Jews who made new lives for themselves and their families in the New World of New York.

Gabler, Neal

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
Through the lives of great founding Hollywood moguls, Gabler presents his central thesis that once-poverty-stricken East European Jews successfully remade America in the image of their own dreams and anxieties.

Greenberg, Hank

Hank Greenberg: The Story of My Life
Pothumus autobiography of the great Detroit Tigers slugger of the 1930s and 1940s, one of only two Jews in baseball's Hall of Fame.

Kemelman, Harry

Conversations with Rabbi Small
Rabbi Small helps a young Christian woman understand the religion of the Jewish man she is about to marry.

Plain, Belva

Tapestry
This historical saga continues the story of the Werner family from the 1920s to the end of WWII.

Tarr, Herbert

Woman of Spirit
A beautifully moving portrait of the best of Jewish motherhood.

Welty, Elly

Berlin Wild
Dr. Josef Bernhardt, a successful anesthesiologist living in Iowa, suddenly flashes back to his war years spent at the Berlin Institute, a haven of scientific research in Hitler's Third Reich.

Segal, Lore

Her First American
An open-hearted, twenty-one year old girl arrives in America eager to begin her new life in New York City where she meets her first real American.

Native Americans

Brown, Dee

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
A guilt-stained chronicle of the plunder, aggression, and hate Native Americans have suffered.

Erdrich, Louise

Love Medicine: A Novel
Moving episodes of grief, laughter, and kinship reinforce one another in a strong novel about two contemporary Native American families.

Power, Susan

The Grass Dancer
The resilience of the North Dakota Sioux is skillfully depicted in a magical first novel that moves backward through layers of history and time.