Got to be Real: Four Original Love Stories

E. Lynn Harris, Eric Jerome Dickey, Colin Cahnner, Marcus Major

Signet, 2000 - African Americans - 407 pages

Four of the biggest male names on the African-American literary scene--E. Lynn Harris, Eric Jerome Dickey, Colin Channer, and Marcus Major-- contribute stories to this anthology that navigate the complex landscape of the human heart.

About the author

Born in Flint, Michigan and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, E. Lynn Harris graduated from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1977, earning a degree in journalism with honors. After college, Harris sold computers for IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and AT&T for 13 years before quitting his job to write his first novel. The resulting book, Invisible Life, was self-published in 1992 and sold mostly at beauty salons and black-owned bookstores. After being published in trade paperback by Anchor Books, Invisible Life became the #1 book on the Blackboard Bestseller List of African-American Titles and spent a total of 25 consecutive months on the list. Harris was an openly gay African American and was best known for his depictions of African American men on the down low or in the closet. He won numerous awards for his work including two Novel of the Year Prizes by the Blackboard African-American Bestsellers, Inc. for Just As I Am and Any Way the Wind Blows, the James Baldwin Award for Literary Excellence for If This World Were Mine, and the Lambda Literary Award for the anthology Freedom in This Village. His other books include And This Too Shall Pass; Abide with Me; Not a Day Goes By; A Love of My Own; I Say a Little Prayer; What Becomes of the Brokenhearted; Just Too Good to Be True, and Basketball Jones. His work also appeared in American Visions, Essence, Washington Post Sunday Magazine, Sports Illustrated and the award-winning anthology Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America. He died on July 23, 2009 at the age of 54.

Eric Jerome Dickey lives in California.

A former middle school teacher, Marcus Major is the author of "Good Peoples", which debuted at #4 on the Blackboard bestseller list & was included in Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program. He lives in southern New Jersey.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Got to be Real: Four Original Love Stories
• Authors: E. Lynn Harris, Eric Jerome Dickey, Colin Cahnner, Marcus Major
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Signet, 2000
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Feb 29, 2008
• ISBN: 0451204328, 9780451204325
• Length: 407 pages