Canonical Fictional Figures in Circulation: The Yale University Press Black Lives Series

Yale University Press has launched a series, Black Lives, which the publisher describes as an effort "to tell the fullest range of stories about the individual women and men who most profoundly shaped African American, Afro Latin, and African history.” According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the advisors for the project, “In launching its Black Lives series of highly readable and definitive biographies, Yale University Press has boldly committed to seeding a massive cultural project aimed at telling the collective African American epic through the life stories of the individual historical figures who created it.”

The series’ about page also features a quotation from Kellie Carter Jackson: “We need more Black biographies," she wrote in a review of one of the books in the series, "Biography matters: It reveals the importance of individual experiences and contributions.”

Interestingly, the two books in the series that have most captured my attention so far focus on the biographies of fictive characters—Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (2025) by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Bigger: A Literary Life (2024) by Trudier Harris. (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb for Harris’s book.)

Jim and Bigger stand out as two of the most well-known Black characters to emerge in American fiction. Although they initially appeared in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Native Son (1940), respectively, both figures have the distinction of reappearing time and again in stage and screen adaptations.

The successive renderings, and, more broadly, the many iterations, of Jim and Bigger across stage, screen, book covers, and translations are revealing and instructive. They chart the evolving interpretations of these characters and also the shifting cultural frameworks through which Black figures have been represented and contested. Harris’s and Fishkin’s books have me thinking more and more about the extended trajectories of these two figures beyond the novels where they first appeared, and they prompt me to consider other Black characters whose presence moves across multiple works and media.

To remix Kellie Carter Jackson: we need more biographies of African American fictional figures, more reception histories of characters who have appeared in one work and gone on to circulate across many others. Such biographies matter, revealing the importance of interpretation and adaptation, as well as the cultural work performed by characters as they move across time, space, and form.

Related 

• Performing Jim: Black Actors and the Afterlives of a Literary Figure