The Most Frequently
Featured Authors in
African American Review

portraits of authors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright.

African American Review (AAR), which was previously known as Negro American Literature Forum (1967-1976) and Black American Literature Forum (1976-1991), has published thousands of critical and creative compositions. Six writers – James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright – are among the most frequently featured novelists in the scholarly journal.

Those six novelists were featured in 300 different articles, published since 1967.

With 112 scholarly articles, Toni Morrison has been a featured author more than any other writer in AAR.

During the 1970s, Richard Wright was the most featured author.

But by the late 1980s, scholars began to write about Morrison more than Wright and others.

The largest number of articles were written about Baldwin, Ellison, Hurston, Morrison, Wright, and Walker during the 1990s and 2000s, which signaled a notably generative moment in the scholarly discourse on African American literature.

The scholarly articles were produced by 282 different scholars. Only 11 of the articles were co-authored.