Fiction
William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) is widely acknowledged as the first African American novel, followed by Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859). However, Black Americans had been publishing works of fiction in periodicals well before the 1850s. “Theresa; A Haytien Tale,” first appeared over three installments in Freedom’s Journal in 1828, and Frederick Douglass’s novella, “The Heroic Slave,” appeared in installments in Frederick Douglass’s Paper in 1853. Though modern readers usually associate fiction with the novel and bound books, nineteenth-century readers most often consumed literature through newspapers and magazines. Even novels were typically read in serial form until well after the Civil War. Charles Dickens, for instance, published several novels in newspapers or monthly serial parts first, before publishing the bound book. Black print was no different. Periodicals like The Anglo-African Magazine and Colored American Magazine were hubs of Black art and literary criticism, featuring fictive sketches, short stories, and serialized novels.
Frederick Douglass. “The Heroic Slave,” in Autographs for Freedom. Edited by Julia Griffiths. Boston: Jewett and Company, 1853.
“Liberty I will have, or die in the attempt to gain it.” Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave” is a fictionalized rendering of the true story of Madison Washington, who escapes enslavement by leading a rebellion aboard the ship Creole in 1841. British activist Julia Griffiths solicited work from an array of prominent abolitionists for two volumes of Autographs for Freedom as an anniversary gift book in support of Frederick Douglass’ Paper.
William J. Wilson. “A Leaf from My Scrap Book,” Autographs for Freedom. Edited by Julia Griffiths. Auburn: Alden, Beardsley & Co., 1854. Vol 2.
The second volume of Autographs for Freedom includes William J. Wilson’s “A Leaf from My Scrap Book,” his account of a debate between Samuel Ringgold Ward, Jr., and Frederick Douglass, dated May, 1849: “You feel Douglass to be right, without always seeing it; perhaps it is not too much to say, when Ward is right you see it.”
This copy is signed, “Samuel J. May. January […] 1854.”
Harriet Wilson. Our Nig; Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Boston: Geo. C. Rand & Avery, 1859.
Martin R. Delany. Blake; or The Huts of America. 1859-1862.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted. Boston: James H. Earle, 1895.
Iola Leroy is Harper’s fourth novel and the first to be published in book form. It tells the story of Iola, the mixed-race protagonist, from before the Civil War through Reconstruction. Iola’s quest to reunite with her family illustrates the deep connections enslaved people maintained despite forced separations and violence.
Charles W. Chesnutt. The Conjure Woman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899.
Letter from Booker T. Washington to Charles Chesnutt, after Washington had returned from Europe (with brief handwritten postscript). October 26, 1903.
James Lowell Gibbs Collection of African American Documents
Letter from Charles Chesnutt to W. E. Ambler, telling Ambler that he could pick up the things he had requested. June 10, 1918.
James Lowell Gibbs Collection of African American Documents
Letter from Charles N. Anderson to Charles Chesnutt praising Chesnutt’s novel, The Marrow of Tradition. December 3, 1902.
James Lowell Gibbs Collection of African American Documents
Pauline Hopkins. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. Boston: Colored Co-operative Publishing Co., 1900.
“[W]e must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history…” Contending Forces is the first of four novels by Pauline Hopkins, founding editor of Colored American Magazine. It tells the tangled and violent history of race and racism in the United States through Boston’s Smith family and their tenants.
View selected pages from Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South
David Bryant Fulton (Jack Thorne). Hanover; or, The Persecution of the Lowly. Story of the Wilmington Massacre. M.C.L. Hill, 1901.
David Bryant Fulton published Hanover under the pseudonym Jack Thorne. The novel is a fictionalized account of the 1898 Wilmington massacre, also known as the Wilmington race riot, in which 2,000 white Americans violently overthrew the elected city government of Wilmington (NC), destroyed the city’s only Black newspaper, killed between 60 and 250 people, and forced thousands of Black residents to flee. Fulton dedicated Hanover to Ida B. Wells.
Freedman Pamphlets.
