5fish
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I learned of this book on NPR... It was published in 1859. It was rediscovered in 1981 in one of those old used book store stories.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Nig
Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is an autobiographical novel by Harriet E. Wilson. It was published in 1859[1] and rediscovered in 1981 by professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It was considered the first novel published by an African-American woman in North America,[2][3] though that record is now contested by another manuscript found by Gates, The Bondwoman's Narrative.
OUR NIG... is unique for a few reasons. One it is the first book published by a black women in the United States and instead of shaming southern slavery. It shamed northern bigotry, racism, and abolitionist.
Our Nig did not sell well because rather than criticizing slavery in the South, it indicts the economy of the north, specifically: the practice of keeping poor people as indentured servants, and the poor treatment of blacks by whites. Critic David Dowling, in "Other and More Terrible Evils: Anticapitalist Rhetoric in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and Proslavery Propaganda", states that the northern abolitionists did not publicize her book because it criticized the North.
This mirrors the early life of Harriet E. Wilson...
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_E._Wilson
Harriet E. Wilson (March 15, 1825 – June 28, 1900) was an African-American novelist. She was the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts, and was not widely known. The novel was discovered in 1982 by the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who documented it as the first African-American novel published in the United States.
Born a free person of color (free Negro) in New Hampshire, Wilson was orphaned when young and bound until the age of 18 as an indentured servant. She struggled to make a living after that, marrying twice; her only son George died at the age of seven in the poor house, where she had placed him while trying to survive as a widow. She wrote one novel. Wilson later was associated with the Spiritualist church, was paid on the public lecture circuit for her lectures about her life, and worked as a housekeeper in a boarding house.
The Plot: A fascinating fusion of two literary models of the nineteenth century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, Our Nig, apart from its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in nineteenth-century Massachusetts.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0036S4ENW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Nig
Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is an autobiographical novel by Harriet E. Wilson. It was published in 1859[1] and rediscovered in 1981 by professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It was considered the first novel published by an African-American woman in North America,[2][3] though that record is now contested by another manuscript found by Gates, The Bondwoman's Narrative.
OUR NIG... is unique for a few reasons. One it is the first book published by a black women in the United States and instead of shaming southern slavery. It shamed northern bigotry, racism, and abolitionist.
Our Nig did not sell well because rather than criticizing slavery in the South, it indicts the economy of the north, specifically: the practice of keeping poor people as indentured servants, and the poor treatment of blacks by whites. Critic David Dowling, in "Other and More Terrible Evils: Anticapitalist Rhetoric in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and Proslavery Propaganda", states that the northern abolitionists did not publicize her book because it criticized the North.
This mirrors the early life of Harriet E. Wilson...
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_E._Wilson
Harriet E. Wilson (March 15, 1825 – June 28, 1900) was an African-American novelist. She was the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts, and was not widely known. The novel was discovered in 1982 by the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who documented it as the first African-American novel published in the United States.
Born a free person of color (free Negro) in New Hampshire, Wilson was orphaned when young and bound until the age of 18 as an indentured servant. She struggled to make a living after that, marrying twice; her only son George died at the age of seven in the poor house, where she had placed him while trying to survive as a widow. She wrote one novel. Wilson later was associated with the Spiritualist church, was paid on the public lecture circuit for her lectures about her life, and worked as a housekeeper in a boarding house.
The Plot: A fascinating fusion of two literary models of the nineteenth century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, Our Nig, apart from its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in nineteenth-century Massachusetts.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0036S4ENW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
