“Surprisingly the first full biography . . . Carretta presents
his significant research in this comprehensive study of
Wheatley. He uncovered her previously unknown earliest writings
in the personal papers of a contemporary. Using court documents
about her husband, John Peters, Carretta found new information
about Wheatley’s postemancipation life in Boston and London,
years about which scholars still know very little. He also
provides fresh analysis of Wheatley’s poetry and gives the
reader a glimpse into the lives of both free and enslaved blacks
in Colonial New England.” With Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moral (1773), Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784) 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, Vincent Carretta
offers the first full-length biogra