The first African American to publish a book
Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 1773. Publishers refused to believe that she was a poet. A group of eighteen Bostonians questioned her then wrote a two-paragraph introduction confirming her talent. The book was finally published in England.
The first African American to publish a novel
William Wells Brown, Clotel, or the President’s Daughter: a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, 1853. It was the story of a girl fathered by President Thomas Jefferson and born to his African American housekeeper.
The first African American woman to publish a novel
Harriet Wilson, Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, 1859. It was also the first novel by a black writer to be published in the United States. It told the story of a free African American woman’s experiences as a servant for a white Massachusetts family.
The first novel by an African American to become a book-of-the-month selection
Richard Wright, Native Son, 1940. Native Son, the story of a young black man who commits murder in a moment of panic, was a best seller and the first novel by an African American writer to enter the mainstream of American literature.
The first novel by an African American woman to sell over one million copies
Ann Petry, The Street, 1946. It is the story of a young woman struggling to raise her son in New York City’s Harlem.
The first African American novel to be bought by Hollywood
Frank Yerby, The Foxes of Harrow, 1946. An historical melodrama, set in the South just before the Civil War, The Foxes of Harrow was purchased by Hollywood and made into a film in 1947 starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O’Hara.
The first African American woman to publish science fiction
Octavia Butler, Clarion, Kindred, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago, and more. Her leading characters are usually independent African American women, and her themes deal with genetic engineering, alien beings, and the use of power.
The first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize
Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen, 1949. Brooks was a poet, mentor, activist, and author of fiction and nonfiction.
The first African American writer to win the National Book Award
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952. The novel was an account of a young African American’s confrontation with discrimination and his inability to be seen apart from his race.
The first African American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved (a Pulitzer Prize winner), Jazz, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Paradise, Love, and A Mercy. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993. “My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger,” she says.
You can find more African American firsts in publishing and other areas in Joan Potter’s African American Firsts: Famous, Little-Known and Unsung Triumphs of Blacks in America (New York: Dafina Books, 2002, 2009).