Harriet E. Wilson

Biography

Harriet E. Wilson (c. 1825–1900) was an African American author who wrote what is now recognized as the first novel published by a Black person in North America. Born Harriet Adams in Milford, New Hampshire, Wilson experienced the particular hardships of a free Black person in the antebellum North—indentured servitude, racial discrimination, and grinding poverty. Her autobiographical novel Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) drew directly on her experience as an indentured servant in a white household. The book was self-published and received virtually no notice during Wilson’s lifetime. It was rediscovered in 1982 by scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., who authenticated it and restored Wilson to her rightful place in American literary history. Wilson’s novel is groundbreaking not only for its priority but for its unflinching portrayal of racial abuse in the supposedly free North, challenging the narrative that slavery was solely a Southern institution. Little is known of Wilson’s later life, though recent research has uncovered her involvement in Spiritualism and her continued struggles with poverty.