Skip to main content
Skip to main content

Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography Of A Genius In Bondage

February 16, 2012 English

English Professor Carretta discusses his biography of Wheatley, a slave who used her poetry to help gain her freedom.

English Professor Carretta discusses his biography of Wheatley, a slave who used her poetry to help gain her freedom.

By Oline Eaton, New Books Network

Few people can claim to have created a literary genre… Phillis Wheatley did. By the time she was twenty, her name- taken from the slave ship that carried her to America and the family that bought her upon arrival- would be known throughout the world.

Extraordinarily well-educated for a woman of her time and place- much less a slave- Wheatley began writing poetry at a young age. The 1773 publication of her first book, entitled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, brought her fame and, ultimately, freedom.

Though she’s celebrated as the mother of African American literature and her poems are taught in schools to this day, Wheatley remains a shadowy figure. In Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (University of Georgia Press, 2011), Vincent Carretta lets the light in.

Read more...