At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley was the first black American poet to publish a book. Her elegies and odes offer fascinating glimpses of the beginnings of African-American literary traditions. Includes a selection from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

The extraordinary writings of Phillis Wheatley, a slave girl turned published poet In 1761, a young girl arrived in Boston on a slave ship, sold to the Wheatley family, and given the name Phillis Wheatley. Struck by Phillis' extraordinary precociousness, the Wheatleys provided her with an education that was unusual for a woman of the time and astonishing for a slave. After studying English and classical literature, geography, the Bible, and Latin, Phillis published her first poem in 1767 at the age of 14, winning much public attention and considerable fame. When Boston publishers who doubted its authenticity rejected an initial collection of her poetry, Wheatley sailed to London in 1773 and found a publisher there for Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. This volume collects both Wheatley's letters and her poetry: hymns, elegies, translations, philosophical poems, tales, and epyllions--including a poignant plea to the Earl of Dartmouth urging freedom for America and comparing the country's condition to her own. With her contemplative elegies and her use of the poetic imagination to escape an unsatisfactory world, Wheatley anticipated the Romantic Movement of the following century. The appendices to this edition include poems of Wheatley's contemporary African-American poets: Lucy Terry, Jupiter Harmon, and Francis Williams. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Carretta offers the first full-length biography of Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784), who became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman--of any race or background--to do so in America.

Contains the complete works of the first African-American to publish a book of poetry.

For nearly thirty-five years Julian Mason's The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (1966) has been the standard edition of the poems and letters of this young black poet of eighteenth-century Boston. This new edition has been extensively revised in light of Wheatley scholarship since its publication. It has been expanded to include all of the fifty-six poems and twenty-two letters now known to be by Wheatley, the significant variants of the poems, and the four Proposals for publication of her works, all of them annotated. This edition contains the recently discovered poem "Ocean," new information about Wheatley's library (including a southern connection), a more accurate reading of a letter central to understanding the response to her 1772 Proposals, new variants of two poems, and a new reading of her George Washington poem. By going back to the original manuscripts (and to first printings when the manuscripts are not extant), Mason has provided the fullest and most accurate edition of Wheatley's poems and letters yet produced. The new index and bibliography assure the volume's usefulness for the scholar, the student, and the general reader.

"This book very conclusively debunks the over two-hundred-year-old conventional wisdom that Wheatley owes her poetic sensibilities to Alexander Pope. ... It will help rejuvenate the study of Wheatley and will be an exciting contribution to scholarly discourse on Wheatley's poetry."--Cedrick May, author of Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760-1835. Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book. Born in Gambia in 1753, she came to America aboard a slave ship, the Phillis. From an early age, Wheatley exhibited a profound gift for verse, publishing her first.