No, we only read fiction by African American authors plus literary criticism. The reading list for the course was A++. The teacher was . . . something else. After almost twenty years, I can be a little more charitable than I was at the time and say in his defense that it was his first teaching gig and he was thrown in the deep end immediately teaching grad students and OMG that must have been terribly hard. But he seemed to be such a ridiculous poseur wannabe ding ding.

He wrote this book that was really well received about the blues (I guess it was probably his dissertation), and he was a musician who played the blues, and he made a big deal about how he lived the blues life on the streets playing with Mister Satan (there's a wikipedia article about them called Satan and Adam). Reading that now and the wikipedia article about him, I can see that he's got the musical bonafides, but he came across at the time as this white guy from a wealthy background who dropped out of Princeton to play act at having a gritty street life. He has an incredibly grating personality, or at least he did at the time. LOL