Considered the first African American woman to publish a novel in English, Harriet E. Adams Wilson (ca. 1827-ca. 1863) is also distinguished as the first black, male or female, to publish a novel in the United States.

Harriet E. Adams Wilson's book, Our Nig; or, Sketches From the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There, is a thinly veiled fictional autobiography depicting the brutality of white racism in the antebellum North. The protagonist is a free, mulatto girl named Alfrado. Abandoned by her parents at the age of six, she is sentenced to years of cruel indentured servitude. The book was originally printed in Boston in 1859, and apparently soon sank into literary obscurity, as virtually no early critical comment on the novel exists. Discovered in 1981 in a Manhattan bookstore by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Cornell University professor...