The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. Oxford University Press, 896 pages, $49.95.

Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes. We associate these names with American literature. Their works and biographies appear in American anthologies and literary companions. But what if we wanted to read about Ellison’s contemporaries, or the influence of the West Indies on plot development? Literary reference books haven’t included most African American writers, nor have they included information on African American culture.

Not until this year.

Last January, Oxford University Press published the first one-volume reference work devoted to African American writing. Co-edited by William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, Trudier Harris, J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English, and Emory University professor Frances Smith Foster, the Oxford Companion to African American Literature is a curriculum aid for teachers, a study tool for graduate students, and a road atlas for readers unfamiliar with the literature.

Combining what Harris calls “the collective wisdom of more than three hundred scholars of African American literature,” the Companion features over four hundred writers, canvassing well beyond the familiar five or six major African American writers. It includes author biographies and text synopses. “We need an expanded sense of who the important writers are,” Andrews says. “We need to be able to read about the people who contributed to the thinking of the culture and the development of the literary traditions and forms. You can’t just jump from one mountain to the next—you don’t get the lay of the land that way.”

Besides author and text profiles, the Companion pays close attention to the literary genres that African American writers employ. These essays range from novels to sermons, from short stories to slave narratives. The editors embraced a wide definition of genre, an inclusiveness they felt was important for the entire book.

“One of the Companion’s most innovative qualities,” Harris says, “is the open mindedness of it all. We didn’t say, we’re going to exclude this or that.” And Andrews adds, “Our ideas about what this book should contain were so expansive that we had trouble figuring out a way to classify everything that we wanted to put in it.”

One result of their “expansive conceptualizing” was an inclusion of many entries on African American culture. This cultural information distinguishes the Companion from other Oxford literature companions. “We wanted to help people who know very little about African American culture understand not only who these authors are, but also the ethos in which they write,” Andrews says. “We include, for instance, what the concept of race means, how music plays important structural and thematic roles in the literature, the significance of certain locations like Detroit, Chicago, and Harlem.”

Both Harris and Andrews call the book a good “starting point” for general readers and scholars of African American literature. Harris sees teachers using it to select texts for their students, read up on an author’s historical context, or find information on further reference materials. Andrews suggests students use it because most articles include bibliographies and cross-references to other entries—helpful source material for getting started on a project.

“There’s been a renaissance in African American literary studies over the last twenty-five years,” Andrews says. “There’s a lot of outstanding literature out there, and a steady growth in the depth and sophistication of African American literary criticism. So there’s a need for this kind of book. African American literature, once thought to be in the margins of literature, is being incorporated into the mainstream. It’s going to be here from now on, and the Companion provides us all sorts of ways we can approach and discuss it.”