USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -In 1838 Boston-based publisher and abolitionist Isaac Knapp published a collection of Wheatley’s poetry, along with that of enslaved North Carolina poet George Moses Horton, under the title Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave.

Detailed explanation-2: -Wheatley was born in 1753 in Gambia. Around the age of seven or eight, she was forcibly kidnapped and brought across the Atlantic on the Phillis and was soon sold as a slave to John and Susanna Wheatley of Boston.

Detailed explanation-3: -In 1773, Phillis Wheatley accomplished something that no other woman of her status had done. When her book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, appeared, she became the first American slave, the first person of African descent, and only the third colonial American woman to have her work published.

Detailed explanation-4: -To make ends meet, Wheatley took menial jobs working as a domestic for people, a task with which she was familiar. Succumbing to illness Wheatley died at the age of 31, but not before she had placed her stamp on the written English word, particularly of the American genre.

Detailed explanation-5: -Phillis Wheatley lived the rest of her life in Boston, where she continued to write poetry. Her works are unique in the way they blend support for the American Revolution with admonishments against the practice of slavery. She died suddenly in 1784, before she was able to publish a second book of poetry.