The eleventh book on our list is 1929's prizewinning Scarlet Sister Mary, by Julia Peterkin. It's the story of a fiercely independent young black woman in the post-slavery coastal south who lives her life outside the moral expectations of her community. She gets pregnant before she gets married, then she marries the wrong man, and after he leaves her she has a bunch of kids with a bunch of different men and never feels too badly about any of it. She has something like nine or ten children, some with men who were one night stands. She's a pretty sexually independent character for the 20's.
