This instructive volume, ably edited by John Edgar Wideman, contains generous selections from major African-American texts of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Narrative, poetry, and essay are well represented in this valuable compendium of early African-American literature.

My Soul Has Grown Deep is an amazing compendium of biographies, autobiographies, journals, poetry and sermons.

It ranges from the first very religious autobiographies and sermons of Richard Allen and Jarena Lee,
then the poems of Phyllis Wheatley,
on into the writings of Olaudah Equiano, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, Nat Love, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells,
W.E.B. DuBois, and concluding with James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

(Separate reviews of individual books will be added under titles.) ( )