A classic feminist novel, The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin, follows a well-to-do white woman from Louisiana on a perilous path of self-discovery. The novel challenges the strict mores of a society that provides only one path of self-fulfillment for women, namely marriage and motherhood.

The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by W. E B DuBois is a classic document of African-American cultural history. In this collection of essays, DuBois articulates, among other things, his influential theory of "double consciousness," which describes how African-Americans wrestle between two identities as black and American.

Mules and Men, published in 1935, was Zora Neale Hurston's second book, and it was the first collection of black folklore published in America.

David Levering Lewis' When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981) is a classic historical study of the Harlem Renaissance. Lewis surveys all the major writers, artists, and intellectuals associated...