2 volumes (xlvii, 1418 pages ; xlv, 1574 pages) : 24 cm Collaborating on The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay have compiled what may be the definitive collection of its kind. Organized chronologically, the massive work gathers writings from six periods of black history: slavery and freedom; Reconstruction; the Harlem Renaissance; Realism, Naturalism and Modernism; the Black Arts Movement and the period since the 1970s. The work begins with the vernacular tradition of spirituals, gospel and the blues; continues through work songs, jazz and rap; ranges through sermons and folktales; and embraces letters and journals, poetry, short fiction, novels, autobiography and drama Includes bibliographical references and indexes v. 1. Beginnings through the Harlem Renaissance. The vernacular tradition, part 1. Spirituals ; Secular rhymes and songs ; Ballads ; Work songs ; The blues ; Folktales -- The literature of slavery and freedom 1476-1865. Jupiter Hammon ; Venture Smith ; Lucy Terry ; Olaudah Equiano ; Phillis Wheatley ; S (early 19th century) ; David Walker ; George Moses Horton ; Sojourner Truth ; Maria W. Stewart ; Solomon Northup ; Martin R. Delany ; Harriet Jacobs ; William Wells Brown ; Henry Highland Garnet ; Victor Séjour ; Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley ; Frederick Douglass ; James M. Whitfield ; William Craft and Ellen Craft ; Frances E.W. Harper ; Harriet E. Wilson ; Hannah Crafts (Hannah Bond) -- Literature of the Reconstruction to the new Negro Renaissance. 1865-1919. Nicholas Said ; Charlotte Forten Grimké ; Booker T. Washington ; Charles W. Chesnutt ; Anna Julia Cooper ; Pauline E. Hopkins ; Ida B. Wells-Barnett ; W.E.B. Du Bois ; James D. Corrothers ; James Weldon Johnson ; Paul Laurence Dunbar ; Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson ; William Stanley Braithwaite ; Fenton Johnson -- Harlem Renaissance, 1919-1940. Arthur A. Schomburg ; Angelina Weld Grimké ; Anne Spencer ; Hubert Harrison ; Jessie Redmon Fauset ; Alain Locke ; Georgia Douglas Johnson ; Marcus Garvey ; René Maran ; Claude McKay ; Zora Neale Hurston ; Nella Larsen ; Jean Toomer ; George Samuel Schuyler ; Rudolph Fisher ; Eric Walrond ; Paul Robeson ; Marita Bonner ; Sterling A. Brown ; Gwendolyn B. Bennett ; Wallace Thurman ; Langston Hughes ; Nicolás Guillén ; Countee Cullen ; Richard Bruce Nugent ; Helene Johnson -- Timeline v. 2. Realism, nautralism, modernism to the present. The vernacular tradition, part 2. Gospel ; Songs of social change ; Jazz ; Rhythm and blues ; Hip-hop ; Sermons and prayers -- Realism, naturalism, modernism, 1940-1960. Melvin B. Tolson ; Dorothy West ; Richard Wright ; Chester B. Himes ; Ann Petry ; Alice Childress ; Robert Hayden ; Ralph Ellison ; Margaret Walker ; Gwendolyn Brooks ; James Baldwin ; Bob Kaufman ; Lorraine Hansberry -- The Black arts era, 1960-1975. Mari Evans ; Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) ; John Alfred Williams ; Martin Luther King Jr. ; Raymond Patterson ; Etheridge Knight ; Adrienne Kennedy ; Calvin Hernton ; Audre Lorde ; Henry Dumas ; Amiri Baraka ; Sonia Sanchez ; Ed Bullins ; Eldridge Cleaver ; A.B. Spellman ; June Jordan ; Jayne Cortez ; Larry Neal ; Ishmael Reed ; Michael S. Harper ; Toni Cade Bambara ; Carolyn M. Rodgers ; Haki R. Madhubuti ; David Henderson ; Nikki Giovanni ; James Alan McPherson ; Amus Mor ; James T. Stewart -- The contemporary period. Albert Murray ; Maya Angelou ; Paule Marshall ; Toni Morrison ; Ernest J. Gaines ; Lucille Clifton ; John Edgar Wideman ; Samuel R. Delany ; Sherley Anne Williams ; Alice Walker ; August Wilson ; Octavia Butler ; Yusef Komunyakaa ; Nathaniel Mackey ; Charles Johnson ; Ntozake Shange ; Gayl Jones ; Jamaica Kincaid ; Gloria Naylor ; Edward P. Jones ; Rita Dove ; Walter Mosley ; Harryette Mullen ; Essex Hemphill ; Caryl Phillips ; Barack Obama ; Elizabeth Alexander ; Suzan-lori Parks ; Natasha Trethewey ; Edwidge Danticat ; Colson Whitehead ; Kevin Young ; Tracy K. Smith -- Timeline