SOURCE: Reid-Pharr, Robert. Introduction to The Garies and Their Friends, pp vii-xviii. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

In the following introduction to the 1997 edition of Webb's The Garies and Their Friends, Reid-Pharr discusses the principles of domesticity and black ethnicity that were integral to Webb's writings and philosophy.

It is remarkable that, even as the study of African American literature and culture has become central to any number of projects within American intellectual life, so little attention has been given a work as significant as Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (1857). The second novel to be published by an African American and one of the first American novels to deal explicitly with miscegenation and the lives of free blacks in the antebellum northeast, The Garies remains in relative obscurity while other early black novels—William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859), and Martin Delany's Blake...