Milton Public Library

Our nig, or, Sketches from the life of a free Black

eng

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fiction

Our nig, or, Sketches from the life of a free Black

electronic resource

dictionaries

Penguin classics

Harriet Wilson (1825-1900) is the first female African American to publish a novel in North America. Her first and only work, "Our Nig: Sketches From the Life From a Free Black" was published in 1859 and was considered lost until 1982 when rediscovered by the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. The novel is largely autobiographical, tracking the life of a free black women in the Antebellum North. At the age of three, the protagonist Frado is abandoned by her parents and left at the house of the Bellmonts, a wealthy New England family. Her life as a free black woman in the North is filled with hardship and suffering. This realistic tale sugar-coats nothing, and the reader witnesses Frado's difficult life as a servant to the family. A groundbreaking work of gender and race identity, Wilson creates a tremendous narrative central to African American history. Much in the vein of Phillis Wheatley and Langston Hughes, Harriet Wilson's novel helped begin the tradition of African American literature in America

adult

Our nigSketches from the life of a free Black