Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
was perhaps the most prolific black female writer of her time.
Between 1900 and 1904, writing mainly for Colored American
Magazine, she published four novels, at least seven short
stories, and numerous articles that often addressed the
injustices and challenges facing African Americans in post–Civil
War America. In Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream, Alisha
Knight provides the first full-length critical analysis of
Hopkins’s work. Scholars have frequently situated Hopkins within
the domestic, sentimental tradition of nineteenth-century
women's writing, with some critics observing that aspects of her
writing, particularly its emphasis on the self-made man, seem
out of place within the domestic tradition. Knight argues that
Hopkins used this often-dismissed theme to critique American
society's ingrained racism and sexism. In her “Famous Men” and
“Famous Women” series for Colored American Magazine, she
constructed her own version of the success