Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945) by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, a classic sociological study of economic and social conditions on the South Side of Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. This book has been revised and enlarged three times, most recently in 1993. The original introduction is by Richard Wright.

The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) by Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychiatrist who founded psychoanalysis. Wright was fascinated by Freud's theories about the connections between dreams and the unconscious, and may have been influenced by Freud's interpretations when he included imagery of stairs, tunnels and walls in his writing.

Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison, an African-American novelist. Ellison's invisible man, who is never named, is a black man struggling to find his own Identity, first in his Southern hometown, and then...