Admired by George Washington, ridiculed by Thomas Jefferson, published in London, and read far and wide, Phillis Wheatley led one of the most extraordinary American lives. Seized in West Africa and forced into slavery as a child, she was sold to a merchant family in Boston, where she became a noted poet at a young age. Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, she composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, praised warriors, and used her verse to variously lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. "Can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?" By doing so, she added her voice to a vibrant, multisided conversation about race, slavery, and discontent with British rule; before and after her emancipation, her verses shook up racial etiquette and used familiar forms to create bold new meanings. She demonstrated a complex but crucial fact of the times: that the American Revolution both strengthened and limited Black slavery. In this new biography, the historian David Waldstreicher offers the fullest account to date of Wheatley's life and works, correcting myths, reconstructing intimate friendships, and deepening our understanding of her verse and the revolutionary era. Throughout The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, he demonstrates the continued vitality and resonance of a woman who wrote, in a founding gesture of American literature, "Thy Power, O Liberty, makes strong the weak / And (wond'rous instinct) Ethiopians speak."

A paradigm-shattering biography of Phillis Wheatley, whose poetry was at the heart of the American Revolution.

About the Author
David Waldstreicher teaches history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is the author of Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification and Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution. He has written for The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Review, and The Atlantic, among other publications.


Book Information
ISBN 9781250321732
Author David Waldstreicher
Format Paperback
Page Count 512
Imprint Picador USA
Publisher St Martin's Press
Weight(grams) 300g