Frank Yerby’s first novel, The Foxes of Harrow, established him as a writer and launched a forty-nine-year career in which he published thirty-three novels. He also became the first African American ...

Contributions by Catherine L. Adams, Stephanie Brown, Gene Andrew Jarrett, John Wharton Lowe, Guirdex Massé, Anderson Rouse, Matthew Teutsch, Donna-lyn Washington, and Veronica T. Watson

Rediscovering ...

John Banville (b. 1945) is a distinguished novelist and winner of several prestigious awards, including the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sea. As a teenager Banville hoped to be a painter, and although ...

Paul Auster (b. 1947) is one of the most critically acclaimed and intensely studied authors in America today. His varied career as a novelist, poet, translator, and filmmaker has attracted scholarly scrutiny ...

Contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, ...

In recent years, the media has attributed the increasing numbers of people producing family trees to the aging of baby boomers, a sense of mortality, a proliferation of internet genealogy sites, and a ...

Contributions by Richard Bodek, Claire P. Curtis, Joseph Kelly, Simon Lewis, Steve Mentz, J. Brent Morris, Peter Sands, Edward Shore, and James O'Neil Spady

Commonly, the word maroon refers to someone cast ...

In the 1850s, a startling new political party appeared on the American scene. Both its members and its critics called the new party by various names, but to most it was known as the Know Nothing Party. ...

Some of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel," Gwendolyn Brooks's "First fight. Then fiddle. " Yet few readers realize ...

In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find ...