Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is editor in chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center and of the daily online magazine The Root. He has received more than forty honorary degrees from institutions the world over.

Photo © 2011 Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A collection from one of our most influential African American writers

An icon of nineteenth-century American fiction, Charles W. Chesnutt, an incisive storyteller of the aftermath of slavery in the South, is widely credited with almost single-handedly inaugurating the African American short story tradition and was the first African American novelist... Read more

A new collection of the seminal writings and speeches of a legendary writer, orator, and civil rights leader
 
This compact volume offers a full course on the remarkable, diverse career of Frederick Douglass, letting us hear once more a necessary historical figure whose guiding voice is needed now as urgently... Read more

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., presents a seminal volume of four classic slave narratives, including the 1749 texts of The Life of Olaudah Equiano, the last edition corrected and published in his lifetime. The collection also includes perhaps the best known and most widely read slave narrative--Narrative of the Life of Frederick... Read more

A unique and comprehensive collection of 26 literary essays that provides real evidence of the rich cultural history of black women in America.
 
Black women’s writing has finally emerged as one of the most dynamic fields of American literature. Here, leading literary critics—both male and female, black and white—look at... Read more

A landmark account of the African American experience during the Civil War and its aftermath

First published in 1892, this stirring novel by the great writer and activist Frances Harper tells the story of the young daughter of a wealthy Mississippi planter who travels to the North to... Read more

Introduced by Maya Angelou, the inspiring sermon-poems of James Weldon Johnson 

James Weldon Johnson was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of the most revered African Americans of all time, whose life demonstrated the full spectrum of struggle and success. In God's Trombones, one of his most celebrated works... Read more

The official movie tie-in edition to the winner of the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, and Lupita Nyong’o, and directed by Steve McQueen
 
New York Times bestseller

“I could not believe that I had never heard of this book. It felt as important as Anne Frank’s Diary, only published nearly... Read more

Now the major motion picture that won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, and Lupita Nyong’o, and directed by Steve McQueen

Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts... Read more

The unique narrative of a slave who fled to freedom and sailed aboard a whaling vessel

John Thompson was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation in 1812. Originally published in 1856, The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave chronicles his enslavement, his escape, and his life in the North... Read more

A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century
 
The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during... Read more

The broadest and most comprehensive collection of writings available by an early civil and women’s rights pioneer

Seventy-one years before Rosa Parks’s courageous act of resistance, police dragged a young black journalist named Ida B. Wells off a train for refusing to give up her seat. The experience shaped Wells’s career, and—when... Read more