Chicago: Path Press, Inc (1969) dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - African American author's first novel, set in a fictitious town in southern Illinois, an account of the early civil rights movement and the fight against segregation and racism in the years just after World War II. Gilbert, born in Arkansas in 1923, commented that his experiences "represent, in capsule, the 20th century transformation of Afro-American life from rural to urban." He moved to Illinois in 1937, served in the Army Air Corps in World War II, worked as a farm hand, mill worker, dining car waiter, and newspaper reporter and editor and political organizer and labor union educator. This book was one of the first two published by Path Press, a Black owned publisher which he and Bennett J. Johnson co-founded in 1969. While this novel achieved some critical success, it did not sell well. Gilbert received many honors and recognition of his activities - including the Alice Browning Award for excellence in the literary arts. Warmly INSCRIBED on the half title page. Laid in is a single folded sheet with a typed poem by Gilbert and dated in 1976. 349 pp.

Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, (1996) dj. Hardcover first edition - Fascinating novel about a confrontation with the FBI on a reservation somewhere north of Denver. A mystery featuring an African American hydrologist who becomes involved because he gave a ride to Louise Yellow Calf, who was hitching on a deserted, snowy road. Interspersed with the story are quotes from old treaties and documents which vividly portray this country's racial history. A very different novel by this African American writer, who is not as widely read as he should be. (although with the release of the film 'American Fiction' based on his novel, 'Erasure' and his highly praised new novel, 'James' that is finally beginning to change). All of his early books are hard to find in the original edition. 200 pp. ISBN: 1-55597-2373.

Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, (2020). A finalist for the Pulitzer prize - "A novel of narrative ingenuity that includes both a heartbreaking illness and a crime story in its exploration of discontent, loss and the possibility of redemption." Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist with an expertise in a very narrow area, but after a field trip to the desert, he "returns home to find his world crumbling. Powerless in the face of his daughterÕs slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket heÕs ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission." Everett is a writer impossible to classify - but in this novel, he goes even further: it was published with three different versions of the ending, and the only clue is a slight variation on the cover illustration (well, maybe there are a couple of other clues...) . 216 pp. ISBN: 978-1644450222.

Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, (1996) dj. Hardcover first edition - Fascinating novel about a confrontation with the FBI on a reservation somewhere north of Denver. A mystery featuring an African American hydrologist who becomes involved because he gave a ride to Louise Yellow Calf, who was hitching on a deserted, snowy road. Interspersed with the story are quotes from old treaties and documents which vividly portray this country's racial history. A very different novel by this African American writer, who is not as widely read as he should be. (although with the release of the film 'American Fiction' based on his novel, 'Erasure' and his highly praised new novel, 'James' that is finally beginning to change). All of his early books are hard to find in the original edition. 200 pp. ISBN: 1-55597-2373.

New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, (2022) dj. Hardcover first edition - The first adult novel by this award-winning author, a "Civil War novel based on the experiences of the African Brigade, a unit of Black soldiers, including many freed, recently enslaved people, that in 1863 poured into the coastal South with Union forces, helping to hunt down rebel guerrillas. The impact these soldiers had on the South was baneful. The formerly enslaved people boomed 'Go Down Moses' as they marched. The blue coat was 'a dread costume on a freed slaves back'. A classic war story told simply and well, its meanings not forced but allowed to bubble up on their own." (NY Times) This novel focuses on one of the actual soldiers in that unit - Sgt. Richard Etheridge, the son of an enslaved woman and her master, who was taught to read and write. 290 pp. ISBN: 978-0802159199.

New York: Hyperion, (1998) dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - The highly praised first novel by this Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper editor - "Like the stigmata of the saints, Lizzie DuBose's physical manifestations of the wounds of her African American ancestors are inexplicable and harrowing. Born in 1960, Lizzie struggles to understand why she relives her great-great-grandmother Ayo's travails, first on a slave ship, later at the hands of a ruthless slaveowner. Bleeding manacle-scars and flay marks on her back convince Lizzie that she's experiencing something more than psychosomatic pain, or the insanity for which she is hospitalized for 14 years. She knows more about Ayo's life than can be gleaned from the diary that her great-grandmother Joy kept at the turn of the century. She knows, too, what secret torment compelled her grandmother Grace to leave her children in Alabama - and to will Lizzie the trunk that holds the quilt that tells Ayo's story.. . Intricate, understated and beautifully controlled, this novel introduces a quietly provocative voice." (Publishers Weekly) SIGNED on the half title page. 235 pp. ISBN: 0-7868-6408-7.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, (2015) dj. SIGNED hardcover - Beatty's very hard to categorize fourth novel, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize (the first American novel to win that award). One reviewer described it as "A galvanizing satire of post-racial America, powered by a wicked wit, with characters who speak a pop-philosopher patois, this is a funny and daring novel that subverts harmful cultural assumptions. From the opening line of the book it challenges stereotypes: 'This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but Ive never stolen anything'. . Its this deliberate subversion of harmful cultural assumptions that makes this daring and abrasive novel a joy to read - the furthest thing imaginable from a selling out of anyone." (The Guardian). SIGNED on the title page. 289 pp. ISBN: 978-0374260507.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. SIGNED first edition - A non-fiction book by this award-winning author which grew out of his travels across the United States over six years, during which he "talked to nearly two hundred African Americans, starting from he long-standing black resort community on Martha's Vineyard, up through New England, and heads west, visiting Chicago, Minneapolis (home of the singer Prince and of the Pilgrim Baptist Church, with its seven choirs and vast outreach), Coeur d'Alene (skinhead capital of the world), Seattle, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. He moves on to the South, to Louisiana and St. Simons Island, where so many slave ships landed, and ends up at home in North Carolina, telling his own family's story. He talks to a wide variety of people: the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West; the Republican congressman from Alaska, Walter Furnace; to a rising young air force major whose father was lynched in Alabama when the major was a child; a vocal welfare mom, a retired railroad conductor, Atlanta's new Panther-style militants, a bisexual AIDS activist, and many, many more." Among Kenan's awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the North Carolina Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. SIGNED on the title page. An uncommon advance copy of this significant book, scarce signed. Selected bibliography. 658 pp.

New York: Ecco Press, (2022). First edition - An elegantly written and absorbing account of Perry's visit to over a dozen cities in the region she called "home" - Alabama and the South - which argues that you must understand the South in order to understand America. Tayari Jones writing in the NY Times comments that "Any attempt to classify this ambitious work, which straddles genre, kicks down the fourth wall, dances with poetry, engages with literary criticism and flits from journalism to memoir to academic writing - well, that's a fools errand and only undermines this insightful, ambitious and moving project. The conviction of this book is that race and racism are fundamental values of the South, that 'the creation of racial slavery in the colonies was a gateway to habits and dispositions that ultimately became the commonplace ways of doing things in this country'." Winner of the National Book Award. A very uncommon advance issue. 386 pp.

New York: Pyramidd Books, (1967). Bennett's satirical - and sometimes raw - first novel, which opens in 1919 in the town of Burnside, Virginia, "a mostly black town with deep internal divisions. The story opens in 1919 as Janus Manning rescues Neva Stapleton from the orphanage by taking her as his bride. Both characters are the product of bi-racial parents and, by virtue of the lightness of their skin, place themselves above their darker skinned neighbors in town. . Bennett shows how the effects of racism have infiltrated the community, creating an atmosphere of systemic self-loathing where the town's inhabitants are 'just as prejudiced against black people as some of you white people are.' Internalized hatred is passed on through the generations, creating a powderkeg of hostility that literally explodes at the end of the novel." (Randall Heath) Although the cover of this paperback edition calls it a "sexually frank novel that tells the shocking truth about a Negro Peyton Place" it also - more accurately perhaps - compares Bennett to James Baldwin. 314 pp plus a list of characters arranged by the color of their skin. Cover photograph by Morgan Kane.

New York: Riverhead Books, 2014. dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - The fifth novel by this award-winning writer, who was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 2013. In the winter of 1953, "after escaping the cruel wrath of her abusive father, Boy Novak finds comfort in a small Massachusetts suburb and a widower named Arturo, whom she later marries. Boy is quite taken with Arturo's daughter Snow, but it's the daughter she has with Arturo that complicates their quiet lives - Bird's birth reveals that Arturo is a light-skinned African-American passing for white. . . The perception of Arturo's race is threatened by Bird. But it's the psychological conflicts that are the most devastating. Arturo was raised with "the idea that there was no need to ever say, that if you knew who you were then that was enough, that not saying was not the same as lying." Is passing dishonest if it isn't an active decision?" SIGNED on the title page. 308 pp. ISBN: 978-1594631399.

New York: Emerson Hall Publishers, (1972). SIGNED first edition - A play which combines music and readings as the characters reflect on their African origins and experiences from slavery to the civil rights movement. In addition to being a Tony nominated playwright, Mitchell was active in the Black theater movement of the 1960s, as well as a theatre historian. Includes an introduction by Mitchell ("A Harlem Playwright Tells of His 'Tell Pharaoh'.") on how the play came to be: originally it was to be read at a one night benefit in 1967, but the cast (which included Ruby Dee and Lou Gossett, among others) had other ideas, and so it continued to evolve - this script was printed in advance of the planned publication date by Prettyman, the publisher of Emerson Hall, for a benefit for the Hudson River Museum in 1972. "Mitchell reached his artistic heights as a dramatist in TELL PHARAOH, an eloquent 'theater-at-the-lectern' history of black people." (Darwin T Turner). A presentation copy INSCRIBED inside the front cover to author Clarence Major ("A great artist and great friend") and dated in 1973. Tall thin format (4 1/4 inches wide by 11 inches tall) in stapled wrappers. Unpaginated (48 pp including covers). ISBN: 0-87829-0176.