Phyllis Wheatley was born, probably in 1753, in The Gambia, West Africa, but in 1761 she was stolen from her parents and transported on a slave ship to Boston, Massachusetts.

There, she was sold to John and Susanna Wheatley, who named her after the ship that had transported her to slavery. They purchased her to be a domestic servant, but when Susanna realized that Phillis had a talent for learning, she allowed her daughter Mary to tutor Phillis in Latin, English, and the Bible. Wheatley soon began composing her own poetry, and her first published poem appeared in the Newport Mercury newspaper on December 21, 1767.

Over the next five years, several more of Wheatley's poems were published in local papers. In October 1770 she wrote an elegy for English evangelical minister George Whitefield that was so popular that it was also reprinted in England, bringing her international recognition.


But when Wheatley tried in 1772 to publish her first volume of poetry, publishers still felt they needed to guarantee to skeptical readers that a black slave could have written the poems she said were hers. She underwent an oral examination by 18 of "the most respectable Characters in Boston," including the governor of Massachusetts, to prove that she was indeed literate and articulate enough to have composed the poems. Wheatley passed the exam, but still could not secure a Boston publisher.


She found an ally across the Atlantic in Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, an evangelical Englishwoman with ties to Whitefield who had read her poetry and who arranged for her book to be published in London.


In 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared. The frontispiece of the original edition, requested by the countess, makes the author's identity and ability very clear: Under the caption "Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston," there is an engraving of the young black woman at her desk, with a piece of paper in front of her, a book at one hand, and a pen in the other.

The image is thought to be the work of Scipio Moorhead, a young African American slave artist.


Wheatley traveled to England to oversee the book's publication, but the trip served other purposes as well. She met many British dignitaries and intellectuals, all of whom celebrated her literary ability, and American diplomat Benjamin Franklin came to call on her in London.


Shortly after her trip, her owners decided to free her according to Wheatley, "at the desire of my friends in England." The trip brought Wheatley fame as an author, and pressure from English abolitionists led to her freedom.


Wheatley's poetic subjects were often the people and places that made news around her. She wrote numerous elegies for friends and acquaintances and also several popular poems supporting the colonists in the American Revolution, even though the white Wheatleys were Tories.


A poem she wrote in October 1775 in honor of George Washington so impressed Washington that he invited her to a private visit with him in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, military headquarters. Washington was himself a slaveholder, but some scholars have speculated that his conversation with Wheatley may have influenced his later discomfort with slavery.


Some readers have criticized Wheatley because her subject matter is not more distinctly African American, and especially because some of her poetry even appears to condone slavery. For example, in "To the University of Cambridge, in New-England," Wheatley refers to Africa as "the land of errors, and Egyptian gloom," and goes on to say that it was God's "gracious hand" which "brought [her] in safety from those dark abodes." But while this poem does reflect Wheatley's evangelical Christianity (she believed that the hidden blessing in her capture was that it allowed her to be exposed to the Bible and be saved), it does not capture the complexities of Wheatley's feelings about her enslavement, or her identification with other African Americans.


In other poems, Wheatley does affirm that her separation from her home was indeed traumatic. For example, in "To the Right Honourable William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth," Wheatley explains that she empathizes with the American colonists because of her own experience with oppression:

"when seeming cruel Fate
Me snatched from Afric's fancied happy seat,
Ah! What bitter pangs molest,
What sorrows laboured in the parent's breast?"

And Wheatley's letters, recently recovered, show clearly that she was aware of racial prejudice and injustice, and that she identified with other people of African descent. Recent scholars agree with Wheatley's implication that her poems supporting the American colonists are part of a larger discourse on freedom from tyranny, a discourse that was inextricably linked to the question of slavery but that she chose to express in terms her immediate audience would receive best.


In 1778 Wheatley married a free black Bostonian, John Peters. The next year, she circulated a proposal for a new collection of poetry, indicating she had written dozens of new poems since 1773. But in a country now at war, the interest that had attended the publication of her first book had waned. Wheatley could not find a publisher and retreated from the public eye. Her short marriage was unhappy, and marred by the deaths in infancy of her first two children. On December 5, 1784, Wheatley died in childbirth along with her third child.


At the time of her death, Wheatley was living in poverty and obscurity on the outskirts of Boston, but the memory of the famed "Ethiopian muse" was strong enough that her obituary was printed in the Boston papers. Since the early 19th century, other African American writers have continually acknowledged their debt to her accomplishments.


Wheatley was the first African American, and the second American woman, to publish a book and is celebrated as the founder of the African American literary tradition. Even today, contemporary readers continue to learn more about the complexities she brought to that role.

"Wheatley, Phillis." Microsoft® Encarta® Africana Third Edition. © 1998-2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.