If you're looking for adult ebooks to read and enjoy, there are many pieces of African American literature that can fit the bill. This type of literature reached the mainstream in the 1970's, when black authors began to achieve best-selling and award-winning status. This is the time when the work of these authors began to be accepted by the academic world as a specific genre of literature, but black authors have been around for much longer, going back to the American Civil Rights movement with authors like Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks and beyond.
One of the leading people to help to promote African American writers was Toni Morrison. She was an editor for Random House, a very well known publishing firm, back in the 1960's and 70's. At the time she edited books by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones. She was influenced by the authors that she edited and began writing her own African American novels.
Her first novel was titled The Bluest Eye and was published in 1970, but her most famous novel was titled Beloved, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and made her the first African American writer to win this prestigious prize. This piece of African American literature described a slave who found freedom, but who killed her infant daughter in order to save her from a life of slavery. Another novel that she is well-known for is the Song of Solomon, which is a story about materialism and brotherhood.
There are many other adult ebooks by well-known African American writers, including those by the poet and novelist Alice Walker. She wrote a famous essay in the 1970's as well as the award winning novel The Color Purple, which tells the story of a young woman named Celie who is abused by her stepfather and then is forced to marry a man who abuses her as well. This book was so highly thought of that it actually became a film by director Steven Spielberg.
There are many other adult ebooks by black authors that are worth reading, such as the fiction novels created by Chester Himes. In the 1950's and 60's he wrote a series of pulp fiction detective novels which feature two New York City police detectives that became very popular to read.
