This page brings together free online books, topic searches, and audiobooks related to African American fiction, including novels, short stories, social themes, cultural life, and urban life, generally by black authors. The materials range from older public domain works to modern novels.
The Topics section below helps readers find books within the huge Internet Archive collection. Each topic link generates an Internet Archive search focused on that subject. Browsing the topics and selecting those of interest is usually easier and more effective than searching Internet Archive directly.
Topics – African American Fiction Books – Black Urban Books Online Free
The topic links below lead to Internet Archive search results related to novels about African Americans and black urban fiction. Each link opens a books-and-documents search focused on a particular topic.
Search results generally include fully readable books. For some subjects, Internet Archive also contains other media, such as images, audio, or video files. These can be selected from the media options above the search results. Filters on the left side of Internet Archive pages can help narrow search results by year, language, or related subjects.
Black American Audiobooks
These audiobook links lead to public domain recordings from LibriVox at Internet Archive. The books recorded by Librivox volunteers were nearly all published before 1930. Recordings include African American literature, poetry, short stories, and novels, including collections of works by several prominent black authors.
All Librivox audiobooks are free and can be streamed online or downloaded for offline listening. See our page on Librivox Audiobooks for useful information and tips.
Search for an Author’s Books
Search for an Author’s Books – Black Authors
Try searching for books by author. In the search bar in this link, in the creator field, replace LAST, FIRST with the author’s name. Save books you like to your Internet Archive account by clicking “Favorite” while logged in.
Related Pages on Century Past
See our Century Past directories for hundreds of webpages of Books; Magazines; Articles, maps, & photos; and Newspapers. You’ll find the same directories on the top Menu. Here are a few suggested pages: