A Dream Deferred
Black Mobility and Housing Reading List
In celebration of Black History Month, Court Theatre’s landmark production of the play, A Raisin in the Sun, and our related program, A Dream Deferred, the National Public Housing Museum, Court Theater, and our partners have collected a series of works of fiction written by Black authors. The collection features a diverse range of Black American experiences and reflections on home, social mobility, and dreams deferred.
The selected works, published between 1946 and 2023, shed light on some of today’s most urgent inequities with wit, suspense, and humor.
Check out these books at your local Chicago Public Library.
Special thanks to Philip Garboden, Sandra Jackson-Opoku, and Crystal Rudds for assisting to compile this list.
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
“Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of Black people’s lives been seen on the stage.”
—James Baldwin
Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe
“Wolfe has written a bittersweet coming-of-age novel set in building 4950 [of the Robert Taylor Homes] in the summer of 1999… A complex and compassionate look at the friends and families, relationships and resistance that existed in that long-gone but not forgotten time and place.”
—Chicago Magazine
Deacon King Kong by James McBride
“Deacon King Kong is by turns cacophonous, slapstick, violent and meditative; it is both frightening and tender, disillusioned and romantic… McBride’s prose is rollicking and unpredictable… The banter among characters is breathtakingly funny.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
The Street by Ann Petry
“A powerful, uncompromising work of social criticism. To this day, few works of fiction have so clearly illuminated the devastating impact of racial injustice.”
—Coretta Scott King
Stateway’s Garden by Jasmon Drain
“A blazingly original story collection about the interconnected lives of the residents of a public housing project on the South Side of Chicago”
—New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
Trumbull Park by Frank London Brown
“How, in the end, determination and decency seem about to triumph, is the theme of this story, unfolded in terms of characters terribly alive and real.”
—Langston Hughes, New York Herald Tribune Book Review
This Is Life: Rediscovered Short Fiction by Frank London Brown
“Between November 1959 and November 1960, he wrote This Is Life, a series of very short stories (most of them around 200 words) for the Chicago Defender. These poignant, vibrant vignettes observed episodes of Black life in Chicago in Brown’s trenchant style.”
—From Beyond Press
The Pork N Beans Projects by Opalocka Lurci
“The Pork N Beans Projects are the most dangerous projects in the city of Miami. Kendrick is trying to survive and make some money for himself in this harsh reality.”
—GoodReads
One Way: Short Stories about Left Turns by Dorsey Howard
“Dorsey shares about the consequences of a life that is full of left turns. He knows this from experience. While several of the stories are fictional, many are based on actual events that happened in Dorsey’s life. Growing up in one of the toughest housing projects in Chicago, Dorsey endured and survived a life filled with left turns, including gangs, drugs, violence and prison.”
—GoodReads
47th Street Black: A Novel by Bayo Ojikutu
“The prize-winning debut of an incendiary new voice in contemporary American fiction, 47th Street Black is the story of JC and Mookie, whose rise in the gangster-driven ghettos of Chicago is as swift as it is brutal.”
—Penguin Random House
