Three themes developed in early African American writings around the issue of slavery: accommodation, protest, and escape
African American Literature
African American Literature
Lucy Terry (1730-1821) Thought to be the author of the oldest piece of African-American literature, “Bars, about an Indian raid on settlers in Massachusetts. It was not published until 1855.
African American Literature Post-slavery Era
African American Literature
Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) The first African-American and the second woman to publish a book in the colonies, she is one of the best known early black poets; her work was praised by leaders of the American Revolution, including George Washington. She is one of the first writers to use an epistolary style (in the form of letters).
African American Literature
History and Current Trends
African American Literature
The first writings by blacks in America was autobiographical and became known as the Slave Narrative
African American Literature
Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) Her slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is the most comprehensive biography of an African American woman prior to the Civil War. In it she recounts her life in slavery in the context of family relationships reshaping the slave narrative genre to include women’s experiences.
African American Literature
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
Orator, journalist, abolitionist, statesman, autobiographer and author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), the most influential African American text of his era. His writing and life created a model of self-hood of such moral and political authority, he was later viewed as a cultural hero.
African American Literature
Jupiter Hammon (c. 1720-c. 1800) Poet Jupiter Hammon, a slave on Long Island, New York, is remembered for his religious poems as well as for An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York (1787), in which he advocated freeing children of slaves instead of condemning them to hereditary slavery. His poem "An Evening Thought" was the first poem published by a black male in America.
Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) (c. 1745-c. 1797)
Eqiano was the first black in America to write an autobiography. In The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) Equiano gives an account of his native land (he was an Ibo from Niger) and the horrors of his captivity and enslavement in the West Indies.