Includes bibliographical references and index.

Locating the big 7 : one hundred anthologies and the most frequently anthologized black short stories -- Writing the South : Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright -- The paradox of homegrown outsiders : Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker -- New York Cityscapes : James Baldwin and Toni Cade Bambara -- Up South : geo-tagging DC and Edward P. Jones's homegrown characters.

Abstract
A history of short stories by Black writers is long overdue. The Geographies of African American Short Stories reveals the importance of thinking about character situated in locales and key cultural settings when engaging short fiction by Black writers. In the process of composing multiple brief narratives, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Edward P. Jones, and more plotted a diverse range of characters across multiple locations—small towns, a famous metropolis, city sidewalks, rural wooded areas, apartment buildings, theaters, prisons, and more. Ultimately, black short story writers made the depiction of Black characters in varied places and spaces integral to the art of storytelling. The history of short stories also involves the circulation of compositions across dozens of literary collections for nearly a century. Anthology editors, who reprinted hundreds of writers, solidified the significance of a core group of short story writers, whom we might refer to as the Big 7. Using quantitative data and extensive bibliographies, this project reveals how editorial practices shaped the canonical formation of African American short fiction. Provided by publisher.