Top 25 Black Authors of the Last Century

Black Authors of the 20^th century deserve to be celebrated and recognized. These black authors are veterans and are known for their talent of expression through writing. These black authors ensure that you have a complete encounter with captivating authentic fiction and non-fiction books, novels, and poetry. Many of these writers of the 20^th century addressed issues relating to racism and the power to overcome and embrace black power. Here is a list of the top 25 black authors that you should experience by reading their books:

Black Authors

1.   Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees.

2.   Toni Morrison

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, “The Bluest Eye”, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

3.    Zora Neale Hurston

Must See: Our Top 25 Black Authors of the Last Century Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, published in 1937.

4.   California Cooper

Joan Cooper, known by her pen name, J. California Cooper, was an American playwright and author. She wrote 17 plays and was named Black Playwright of the Year in 1978 for her play Strangers.

5.   Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she published the novel “The Color Purple”, for which she won the National Book Award for hardcover fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

6.   Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

7.   James Baldwin

James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist. His essays, collected in Notes of a Native Son, explore intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in the Western society of the United States during the mid twentieth-century.

8.   Lynn Harris

Everette Lynn Harris was an American author. Openly gay, he was best known for his depictions of African-American men who were on the down-low and closeted. He authored ten consecutive books that made The New York Times Best Seller list, making him among the most successful African-American or gay authors of his era.

9.   Terry McMillan

Terry McMillan is an American novelist. Her work is characterized by female protagonists. Terry McMillan is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, A Day Late and a Dollar Short, The Interruption of Everything, I Almost Forgot About You, and the editor of Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction. Four of Ms. McMillan’s novels have been made into movies: Waiting to Exhale (Twentieth Century Fox, 1995); How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Twentieth Century Fox, 1998); Disappearing Acts (HBO Pictures, 1999); and A Day Late and a Dollar Short (Lifetime, 2014).

10.   Bebe Moore Campbell

Bebe Moore Campbell, was an American author, journalist and teacher. Campbell was the author of three New York Times bestsellers: Brothers and Sisters, Singing in the Comeback Choir, and What You Owe Me, which was also a Los Angeles Times “Best Book of 2001”.

11.   Richard Wright

Richard Nathaniel Wright was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, who suffered discrimination and violence in the South and the North.

12.   Walter Mosley

Must See: Our Top 25 Black Authors of the Last Century Walter Ellis Mosley (born January 12, 1952) is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. They are perhaps his most popular works. In 2020, Mosley received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first black male to receive the honor.

13.   Eric Jerome Dickey

Eric Jerome Dickey was an American author. He wrote several crime novels involving grifters, ex cons, and assassins, the latter novels having more diverse settings, moving from Los Angeles to the United Kingdom to the West Indies, each having an international cast of characters.

14.   Octavia Butler

Must See: Our Top 25 Black Authors of the Last Century Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction author. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, she became in 1995 the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Born in Pasadena, California, Butler was raised by her widowed mother.

15.   Sheneska Jackson

With two novels behind her and a potential career writing for Hollywood, Jackson knows her career choice was the right one, despite some initial setbacks. “I live for the times when I write a passage that makes me stop cold or burst out laughing,” Jackson wrote in Essence “At those moments I know that what I’m doing is worthwhile.”

16.   Alex Haley

Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was an American writer and the author of the 1976 book Roots: “The Saga of an American Family.” ABC adapted the book as a television mini-series of the same name and aired it in 1977 to a record-breaking audience of 130 million viewers.

17.   Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was an African-American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel “Invisible Man”, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote “Shadow and Act”, a collection of political, social and critical essays, and “Going to the Territory.”

18.   Gloria Naylor

Gloria Naylor was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills and Mama Day. During her career as a professor, Naylor taught writing and literature at several universities, including George Washington University, New York University, Boston University, University of Kent, University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University.

19.   Iyanla Vanzant

Must See: Our Top 25 Black Authors of the Last Century Iyanla Vanzant is an American inspirational speaker, lawyer, New Thought spiritual teacher, author, life coach, and television personality. She is known primarily for her books, her eponymous talk show, and her appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

20.   Omar Tyree

Omar Rashad Tyree is an African-American novelist. Tyree also known as Briggs was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, and graduated from Central High School in 1987, after which he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied to become a pharmacist, like his mother.

21.   Albert French

Albert French is an American author and publisher whose works mainly focusing on the rural life of African Americans, are known for their intensity and distinctive style, and have been translated into several languages.

22.   Connie Briscoe

Connie Briscoe is an American writer of romantic and historical fiction. Briscoe’s first novel, “Sisters and Lovers”, sold nearly 500,000 copies in cloth and paperback combined in its first two years.

23.   Ernest Gaines

Ernest James Gaines was an American Black Authors whose works have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese. Four of his works were made into television movies.

24.   Chester Himes

Must See: Our Top 25 Black Authors of the Last Century Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 – November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works, some of which have been filmed, include “If He Hollers Let Him Go”, published in 1945, and the “Harlem Detective” series of novels for which he is best known, set in the 1950s and early 1960s and featuring two black policemen called Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson.

25.   Nikki Giovanni

Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni Jr. (born June 7, 1943) is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world’s most well-known African-American poets. Her works include poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children’s literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she has been named as one of Oprah Winfrey’s 25 “Living Legends”.

The above black authors have won the best-seller award at least once and continue to leave an impressionable imprint on the mind of all their readers. Curated by: Ishmael Osekre