Phillis Wheatley Peters bookcover

Phillis Wheatley Peters

4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world

Description

This new edition of Phillis Wheatley Peters is the first full-length biography of the poet whose remarkable odyssey took her from being a child enslaved in Africa to becoming an international celebrity by the time she was in her early twenties, only to fall into relative obscurity when she died in 1784 at barely the age of thirty.

Introduced to Benjamin Franklin in London, praised by her correspondent George Washington, and criticized by Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley (later Peters) laid claim to being the virtual poet laureate during the American Revolution as well as in the new United States. She overcame contemporaneous restraints of age, gender, race, and social status to assert her position as the unofficial spokesperson and critical observer of the nation that claimed to be founded on the principle that all men are created equal.

Grounded in extensive primary research, Phillis Wheatley Peters recovers her life and times and reclaims the recognition and status she deserves as a heroic literary and political figure in an age of heroes. She is indisputably the founder of African American literature. Contemporary African American authors, including Nikki Giovanni, Amanda Gorman, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, June Jordan, and Alice Walker, celebrate Phillis Wheatley Peters's transcendent literary achievement and influence.

This new edition incorporates significant discoveries that Vincent Carretta and others have made since the book's initial publication about Wheatley's education, affiliations, activities, publications, marriage, husband, maternity, later years, and the posthumous survival of the manuscript of her proposed second volume of writings. Moreover, this new edition gives Carretta the opportunity to reconsider some previously available evidence.

Product Details

PublisherUniversity of Georgia Press
Publish DateApril 15, 2023
Pages328
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9780820363325
Dimensions8.6 X 5.6 X 0.3 inches | 0.9 pounds

About the Author

VINCENT CARRETTA is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor of more than ten books, including scholarly editions of the writings of Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Ignatius Sancho, and Ottobah Cugoano. His books include Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage; Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man; and The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, the First African Anglican Missionary, coedited with Ty M. Reese (all Georgia). He lives in Springfield, Virginia.

Reviews

Carretta presents his significant research in this comprehensive study of Wheatley Peters. He uncovered her previously unknown earliest writings in the personal papers of a contemporary. Using court documents about her husband, Carretta found new information about her postemancipation life in Boston and London, years about which scholars still know very little. He also provides fresh analysis of Peters's poetry and gives the reader a glimpse into the lives of both free and enslaved blacks in Colonial New England.-- "Library Journal"
Carretta's well-researched narrative succeeds in bringing the 'genius in bondage' out of history's shadows. . . . Wheatley Peters emerges from the pages of Carretta's biography as a resourceful poet who played an active role in the production and distribution of her own writing on both sides of the Atlantic.-- "Times Literary Supplement"
Phillis Wheatley Peters is one of the very few women writers to have invented a literary tradition. Lavishly praised and viciously maligned, the enormity of Wheatley Peters's artistic achievements has long been obscured by the political uses to which she and her poetry have been put. Even more obscured have been the details of Wheatley Peters's life. At last, Vincent Carretta has written a biography of this great writer as complex and as nuanced as Wheatley Peters and her work themselves. This book resurrects the 'mother' of the African American literary tradition, vividly, scrupulously, and without sentimentality, as no other biography of her has done.--Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University "author of The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers"
This is a satisfying study of the 'elusive' Wheatley Peters, fleshed out with succinct, discerning readings of the body of her work. . . . Especially noteworthy is the book's attentiveness to Peters's involvement in the production and promotion of her book, the contemporary responses to her work, and an unprecedented account of her marriage to the debt-ridden John Peters, whose death forced her into domestic service.-- "Publishers Weekly"

Earn by promoting books

Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.sign up to affiliate program link
Become an affiliate