This new edition of Phillis Wheatley Peters is the first full-length
biography of the poet whose remarkable odyssey took her from being a
child enslaved in Africa to becoming an international celebrity by the
time she was in her early twenties, only to fall into relative obscurity
when she died in 1784 at barely the age of thirty.
Introduced to Benjamin Franklin in London, praised by her correspondent
George Washington, and criticized by Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley
(later Peters) laid claim to being the virtual poet laureate during the
American Revolution as well as in the new United States. She overcame
contemporaneous restraints of age, gender, race, and social status to
assert her position as the unofficial spokesperson and critical observer
of the nation that claimed to be founded on the principle that all men
are created equal.
Grounded in extensive primary research, Phillis Wheatley Peters recovers
her life and times and reclaims the recognition and status she deserves
as a heroic literary and political figure in an age of heroes. She is
indisputably the founder of African American literature. Contemporary
African American authors, including Nikki Giovanni, Amanda Gorman,
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, June Jordan, and Alice Walker, celebrate
Phillis Wheatley Peters's transcendent literary achievement and
influence.
This new edition incorporates significant discoveries that Vincent
Carretta and others have made since the book's initial publication about
Wheatley's education, affiliations, activities, publications, marriage,
husband, maternity, later years, and the posthumous survival of the
manuscript of her proposed second volume of writings. Moreover, this new
edition gives Carretta the opportunity to reconsider some previously
available evidence.
