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Invisible Darkness offers a striking interpretation of the tortured lives of the two major novelists of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Nella Larsen, author of Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Charles R. Larson examines the common belief that both writers "disappeared" after the Harlem Renaissance and died in obscurity; he dispels the misconception that they vanished into the white world and lived unproductive and unrewarding lives.

In clear, jargon-free language, Larson demonstrates the opposing views that both writers had about their work vis-à-vis the incipient black arts movement; he traces each writer's troubled childhood and describes the unresolved questions of race that haunted Toomer and Larsen all of their lives. Larson follows Toomer through the wreckage of his personal life as well as the troubled years of his increasingly quirky spiritual quest until his death in a nursing home in 1967. Using previously unpublished letters and documents, Larson establishes for the first time the details of Larsen's life, illustrating that virtually every published fact about her life is incorrect.

With an innovative chronology that breaks the conventions of the traditional biographical form, Larson narrates what happened to both of these writers during their supposed years of withdrawal. He demonstrates that Nella Larsen never really gave up her fight for creative and personal fulfillment and that Jean Toomer's connection to the Harlem Renaissance—and the black world—is at best a dubious one. This strong revisionist interpretation of two major writers will have a major i mpact on African American literary studies.

Originally published in 1986, this new edition returns to print a classic, influential work of American fiction

The author of the acclaimed novel Reflex and Bone Structure returns here in My Amputations to the question of identity, the double, adventure, detection, and mystery, but with more hypnotic power and range. In My Amputations he has his protagonist, Mason Ellis (who may just be “a desperate ex-con” or a wronged American novelist out to right the wrong done to him), jump through flaming loops like a trained dog, so to speak. In other words, there seems to be no end to the troubles Mason Ellis faces.
 
His story takes him from the South Side of Chicago, to New York, with a stint in Attica prison, across America and Europe and into the primal depths of Africa. Mason, all the while, tries to convince the reader that he is the important American writer he says he is. Upon his release from prison he sets out to prove his claim. After an audacious bank-robbery and a couple of burglaries that are hilarious, he goes into hiding to escape the malice of one of his cohorts, and eventually flees to Europe. The irony is that he is now as much the runner as the seeker. After encounters with a Zuni ex-folksinger, kidnappers, the New York underworld, literary groupies, an Italian swordsman, a violent German secret society, and an anti-bellum cotillion in rural Greece, he finds himself face to face (behind a mask) with his own destiny.

Born on the eve of the Civil War, Charles W. Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a county seat of four or five thousand people, a once-bustling commercial center slipping into postwar decline. Poor, black, and determined to outstrip his modest beginnings and forlorn surroundings, Chesnutt kept a detailed record of his thoughts, observations, and activities from his sixteenth through his twenty-fourth year (1874-1882). These journals, printed here for the first time, are remarkable for their intimate account of a gifted young black man's dawning sense of himself as a writer in the nineteenth century.
Though he achieved literary success in his time, Chesnutt has only recently been rediscovered and his contribution to American literature given its due. The only known private diary from a nineteenth-century African American author, these pages offer a fascinating glimpse into Chesnutt's everyday experience as he struggled to win the goods of education in the world of the post-Civil War South. An extraordinary portrait of the self-made man beset by the urgencies and difficulties of self-improvement in a racially discriminatory society, Chesnutt's journals unfold a richly detailed local history of postwar North Carolina. They also show with great force how the world of the postwar South obstructed--and, unexpectedly, assisted--a black man of driving intellectual ambitions.