Henry Louis Gates Jr. was wandering through a rare bookshop in New York City four decades ago when he spied an unusual-looking volume published in 1859. That discovery would change the history of African American literature.
The book is subtitled “Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a two-story white house, North,” and its main title is a racial epithet. Eager to discover the identity of the author, who is not named in the book, Gates scoured archives and historical records. He determined the writer was Harriet E. Wilson, who was born a free Black woman in Milford, N.H., but spent most of her early life as an indentured servant. Gates republished the work with his findings in 1983 and established that Wilson’s book was the first novel published by an African American in the United States.
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