Introduction

This chapter discusses a range of novels, short stories and essays by black American women writers from the Harlem Renaissance to the present time. It begins with a survey of 19th-century black women's slave narratives, early sentimental novels and autobiographies and then focuses on six writers: Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou. The text shows how these writers have developed the preoccupations, themes and narrative strategies of their literary ancestors. Arna Bontemps said of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance: 'it required apologies. It was not first rate, but it was an anticipation of what was to come'. The same can be said of the pioneering black voices that feed into the Harlem Renaissance. It is on those that the writers who came to dominance during the Harlem Renaissance drew for example and inspiration, and on which the ever-strengthening distinctiveness of a black female literary tradition has been built.