Person · 1753–1784

Phillis Wheatley

Kidnapped from West Africa as a child, she became the first African American to publish a book of poetry — and a living rebuttal to claims that Black people could not create art.

A central figure of early Black literature and a living rebuttal to the era's claims of Black inferiority.

Brought to Boston on a slave ship around 1761 and sold to the Wheatley family, the girl they renamed Phillis showed such gifts that she learned to read English, Latin, and Greek within a few years. In 1773 she published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in London — the first book of poetry by an African American.

Because so many doubted an enslaved African could have written it, Wheatley was examined by a panel of Boston notables who attested to her authorship. Her work was wielded by abolitionists as proof of Black intellectual capacity, directly contradicting the racial ideology of her age. She was freed soon after, but died in poverty at about thirty.

Literature