Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1781) became the first
African-American woman to publish a volume of her own poetry when her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published
in Boston in 1773. She was born in west Africa and was kidnapped by slave traders
and brought by ship to Boston in 1761; she was believed to be seven or eight years
old, but we know almost nothing else about her childhood in Africa or her family
there. The slave ship that carried her was called the Phillis, and she was given that name when she was purchased by the Wheatleys,
a well-off and prominent Boston family. John Wheatley was originally a tailor who
branched out into a substantial business in wholesaling, shipping, and
money-lending; his wife Susanna became an active supporter of Methodist and
Presbyterian missionaries who came from England to preach in the colonies. When they
purchased Phillis, the Wheatleys had eighteen-year-old twins, Nathaniel and Mary,
and several other enslaved men and women working in their household. 
Source: Phillis Wheatley, print, after (?) Scipio Moorhead
The Wheatleys seem quickly to have recognized Phillis's precocious talents with
language, and taught her to read English, almost certainly starting with the King
James translation of the Bible. Before long, however, she was reading the works of
English poets like Alexander Pope and John Milton, as well as English translations
of classical poets like Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. John Wheatley testified that within
sixteen months of her arrival, Phillis was able to read even the most difficult
parts of the Bible, which is extraordinary for any nine-year-old and pretty much
unprecedented for enslaved African-Americans in the eighteenth century, most of whom
were never taught to read by their masters. White Americans generally feared
teaching the people they claimed ownership over how to read and write lest they use
those tools to work against the system that kept them in bondage, and in many places
it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read. Phillis began publishing poems in
New England newspapers at the age of fourteen, and continued to publish occasional
poetry (that is, poems on particular current occasions or events) in newspapers over
the next several years. She wrote poems of consolation addressed to people who had
lost loved ones, but also poems addressing public events like the Boston Massacre in
1773.
Wheatley had a breakthrough of sorts when she published her elegaic poem "On Death of
George Whitefield" in pamphlet form in October 1770. Whitefield, the most famous
preacher of the day, had preached several times in August 1770 at the Old South
Church in Boston (Wheatley may have heard him then; the Wheatley family certainly
knew him personally), but died unexpectedly the next month in Newburyport,
Massachussetts, about 35 miles north of Boston, and was buried there. Wheatley's
poem on Whitefield was widely sold in New England, and then republished in London to
great acclaim. The Wheatleys sought subscribers for a volume of her poetry to be
published in Boston, but they do not seem to have attracted enough of them to make
the venture financially viable (why they did not subsidize it themselves is unknown;
they certainly could have afforded to). They turned to Archibald Bell, a London
publisher of religious texts, who was able to gain the patronage of Selina, the
Countess of Huntington. She had been George Whitefield's patron and was a prominent
supporter of Methodist causes in England. The Countess helped subsidize the
publication of Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and
Moral in 1773, which Wheatley in turn dedicated to her. Phillis Wheatley
went to London (accompanied by Nathaniel Wheatley and traveling on the Wheatleys'
own ship) to supervise the printing and publication of her book, and was treated as
a celebrity, meeting aristocrats and prominent public figures (including Benjamin
Franklin, then resident in London officially as an advocate for the colony of
Pennsylvania, but serving in general as a voice for the cause of the American
colonists), and being given tours of the Tower of London and the British Museum. She
returned to Boston just before the book was published. Susanna was ill (she died in
early 1774), and Nathaniel may have prevailed upon Phillis to return to help take
care of her. But, as Vincent Caretta has suggested, Phillis may also have made a
deal here, exchanging her willingness to return to Boston for the guarantee of her
freedom. In any case, she was released from enslavement in October 1773, and
although she stayed a part of the Wheatley household until the death of John
Wheatley in 1778, she was now a free woman.
After John Wheatley's death, Phillis married John Peters, a free black man who was a
grocer in Boston. She solicited subscriptions for a second volume of poetry, but
with little success, and although some of the poems that would have gone into the
volume were later published in newspapers, a lot of them were lost. John Peters had
financial troubles and spent much time in jail for debt. He was in jail, in fact,
when Phillis died of unknown causes in December 1784.
Readers immediately recognized the great skill with which Wheatley adapted
contemporary English poetic forms, such as the heroic couplet and iambic pentameter
blank verse, and classical models to topics such as her own enslavement and the
situation of the American colonies. It is not surprising to discover that many
contemporary critics had a hard time disentangling her identity as a teen-aged
African-American enslaved girl from their evaluation of the quality and significance
of her verse. Her publisher Archibald Bell insisted, it seems, that John Wheatley
have prominent Bostonians testify that the poems were indeed by Phillis and not
written by someone else, and he did so; the testimony appears at the beginning of
the published Poems. Other critics enlisted her in the
nascent abolitionist cause, using her obvious gifts as evidence for the equality of
Africans with Europeans, and proof that slavery was immoral. As scholars in recent
decades have studied and recovered her poems and letters, Phillis Wheatley's place
as one of the most important and originary voices of American literature has become
secure.