Books like Negroland
The Pulitzer-winning critic remembers growing up in the Black upper middle class of mid-century Chicago, with its manners, its pressures and its uneasy sense of belonging.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Negroland
Heavy
Kiese Laymon writes a memoir to his mother about growing up Black in Mississippi, about weight, gambling, abuse and love, and the lies they told to survive.
Between the World and Me
A letter from a father to his fifteen-year-old son about what it means to live in a Black body in America, written in the shadow of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Prince Jones.
The Color of Water
A Black writer tells his own story alongside that of his white Jewish mother, who raised twelve children and refused to discuss her past.
Notes of a Native Son
Baldwin returns from Paris to America to bury his father, and in ten essays lays out what the country's racial lie has cost a son, a church, and a prose style.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Angelou's Stamps, Arkansas childhood under Jim Crow, the pastor-grandmother's store, the trauma that silenced her, and the teacher who taught her back into language.
Men We Reaped
Jesmyn Ward remembers five young Black men from her Mississippi Gulf Coast town, her brother among them, who died in the space of four years, and asks what the country takes from them.
Tar Baby
A successful Black model visiting her wealthy white patrons on a Caribbean island meets a drifter who upends her sense of self.
The Fire Next Time
Two essays on race in America, a letter to Baldwin's nephew and a reflection on religion and the Nation of Islam, that remain as urgent and incandescent as when they were written.
Black Boy
Richard Wright's memoir of growing up hungry and defiant in the Jim Crow South, in Mississippi, Arkansas and Memphis, and of the books that convinced him there was a way out.
Fun Home
Bechdel diagrams her closeted-gay funeral-director father's life and her own coming-out against his in panels that feel like rooms of a house she can't quite leave.
Blanche on the Lam
Sentenced to thirty days for bouncing cheques, Blanche White, a Black domestic worker, slips out of the courthouse and hides as the new maid for a wealthy white family at their summer house in North Carolina, just before a body turns up.
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic
A classicist's elderly father audits his seminar on the Odyssey, and together they take a Mediterranean cruise retracing Odysseus's route.