With generous support from the African Studies Center's US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center grant, the Penn Libraries have acquired the African Writers Series e-book collection.
Heinemann began its African Writers Series in 1962 with Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (the 2002 Penn Reading Project). The online collection, produced by Chadwyck-Healey, a ProQuest subsidiary, contains more than 230 volumes up to AWS's closing in 2003. Chadwyck-Healey hopes that all 359 published volumes will be online by late 2008.
The African Writers Series was intended to offer African literature to African readers at an affordable price. AWS published works by all major African writers of its era as well as important earlier works. The series covered all literary genres - novels and short stories, poetry, drama, folk tales, speeches, letters, essays, and autobiography. More than one-quarter of the works recognized as "Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century" appeared in AWS. Many AWS titles are recognizable as classics, including:
- Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe
- The Poor Christ of Bomba by Mongo Beti
- The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar by Syl Cheney-Coker
- Climbie by Bernard Dadie
- The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta
- A Question of Power by Bessie Head
- Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane
- The Suns of Independence by Ahmadou Kourouma
- The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera
- Chaka by Thomas Mofolo
- Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder by Christopher Okigbo
- The Old Man and the Medal by Ferdinand Oyono
- Song of Lawino by Okot p'Bitek
The African Writers Series uses the familiar Chadwyck-Healey LION - Literature Online interface, with fulltext and bibliographic searching, original page-number displays, and persistent URLs for whole works and for chapters. Records for AWS Online titles in Franklin will appear soon.
For more information:
Lauris Olson, Social Sciences Bibliographer
