With Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) Phillis Wheatley 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. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and when she was still a slave, Wheatley's work was an international sensation.
In Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage Vincent Carretta offers the first full-length biography of a figure whose origins and later life have remained shadowy despite her iconic status. Carretta relocates Wheatley from the margins to the center of her eighteenth-century transatlantic world, revealing the fascinating life of a woman who rose from the indignity of enslavement to earn wide recognition, only to die obscurity a few years later. Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage restores Phillis Wheatley to the recognition and status she deserves as a heroic figure in an age of heroes.
