Includes bibliographical references (page 64)

Maya Angelou -- James Baldwin -- Amiri Baraka -- Gwendolyn Brooks -- William Wells Brown -- Charles W. Chesnutt -- Countee Cullen -- Frederick Douglass -- W.E.B. DuBois -- Paul Laurence Dunbar -- Ralph Ellison -- Olaudah Equiano -- Nikki Giovanni -- Alex Haley. -- Lorraine Hansberry -- Langston Hughes -- Zora Neale Hurston -- James Weldon Johnson -- Martin Luther King Jr. -- Malcolm X -- Paule Marshall -- Claude McKay -- Toni Morrison -- Gordon Parks -- Paul Robeson -- Sonia Sanchez -- Jean Toomer -- Alice Walker -- Phillis Wheatley -- Richard Wright

A survey of the history of African American literature, from slave narratives to the present, told in the voice of a grandfather speaking to his granddaughter