Getting Started

If one is beginning to research a topic pertaining to African American literature about which one knows relatively little, the database Literature Resource Center might be particularly useful. Literature Resource Center provides up-to-date criticism, biographies, bibliographies, work overviews and explications, Web sites, periodical articles, compare and contrast pages, full-text author's works, and reading lists on nearly 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world. African American authors and relevant topics are well represented.

Literature Resource Center includes the following databases:

• Contemporary Authors
  A bio-bibliographical guide to more than 120,000 current U.S. and international authors in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, and other fields.

• Contemporary Literary Criticism Select
  An extensive collection of critical essays on contemporary authors. Each entry contains a biographical/critical introduction, listing of principal works and sources for further study.

• Dictionary of Literary Biography
  Nearly 10,000 biocritical essays on 7,000 authors.

In addition to almost 300,000 full-text articles from more than 130 literary journals, Literature Resource Center provides full-text access to Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature and points to over 5,000 evaluated author-related Web sites.