When Invisible Man first appeared in 1952, it remained on best-seller lists for 16 weeks, won the National Book Award, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the pillars of 20th-century American literature. Expelled from a southern black college for introducing a white trustee to some local color, a nameless young man moves to Harlem. There he embarks on what will become a life-long search for truth and a better life. Learning that his former headmaster's...

Four children witness a confrontation between an elderly black man and a white storekeeper in rural Mississippi in the 1930s.

Writer John Howard Griffin decided to perform an experiment fifty years ago. In order to learn firsthand how one race could withstand the second class citizenship imposed on it by another, he dyed his white skin dark, left his family, and traveled to the South to live as a black man. What began as scientific research ended up changing his life in every way imaginable. This is an eyewitness account of discrimination and segregation that is terrifying...

Penn Cage, now mayor of Natchez, goes up against a mix of murder, racial tension, double-crosses, illicit sex...and all of the ensuing violent consequences in the kudzu-strangled, snake- rat- and armadillo-infested hole of the Devil's Punchbowl.

When Reenie and her mother, who are African Americans, go fishing, Reenie decides to share the secret of their success with their needy white neighbors.

When acclaimed Washington Post writer Wil Haygood had an early hunch that Obama would win the 2008 election, he thought he'd highlight the singular moment by exploring the life of someone who had come of age when segregation was so widespread, so embedded in the culture, as to make the very thought of a black president inconceivable. He struck gold when he tracked down Eugene Allen, a butler who had served no fewer than eight presidents, from Harry...

T his monumental study chronicles the maltreatment of Indians as far back as the American Revolution. Focusing mainly on the Delaware and the Cheyenne, the text reveals a succession of broken treaties, the government's forced removal of tribes from choice lands, and other examples of inhuman treatment of the nation's 300,000 Indians.

When he joins a predominantly black "Teen Dream Team" that will be representing the United States in an international basketball tournament in Rome, Jimmy Doyle makes some unexpected discoveries about prejudice, racism, and politics.

"Written with the haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout and Barbara Kingsolver, an astonishing debut novel that explores the lingering effects of a brutal crime on the women of one small Texas oil town in the 1970s. It's February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town's men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early...