In "The Lesson," another story from the collection Gorilla, My Love, a community worker from Harlem gives the children in her neighborhood a harsh lesson in inequality by taking them on an outing to the expensive F.A.O. Schwarz toy store in midtown Manhattan.

Paule Marshall's novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) is about a girl's growth into young womanhood in a Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood populated by immigrants from Barbados.

Sherley A. Williams gives a critical analysis of heroes in African American fiction from the nineteenth century through the 1960s, focusing on what she calls "neo-black literature," in Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature (1972).

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a novel by Mark Twain, is an American classic about a white boy and a runaway slave who escape together down the Mississippi. Huck, like Hazel, narrates...