Black First of the Day

1859

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)

In 1859 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote "The Two Offers," the first short story published by a black woman in the United States. It appeared in the Anglo-African magazine in 1859. Harper was born in Baltimore, Maryland, of free parents. By age fourteen she had a fairly good education for the time and was already established as a writer and scholar. She became a noted speaker in the abolition movement, including that as permanent lecturer for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society. After the Civil War her lectures addressed such issues as the suffrage and temperance movements as well as women's rights. Often she interspersed poetry throughout her lectures. Although her poems addressed a variety of issues, Harper is often referred to as an abolitionist poet; she was also the most popular black poet of her time. Her first volume appeared in 1845, when she was twenty-one years old. She was an extremely successful poet--Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects launched her career and is reported to have sold fifty thousand copies by 1878--and her novel Iola Leroy (1892) had three editions printed.

Sources: Brown, Davis, and Lee, The Negro Caravan, p. 293; Logan and Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography, pp. 289-90; Hughes and Bontemps, The Poetry of the Negro 1746-1949, p. 397; Jackson, A History of Afro-American Literature, vol. 1, pp. 265-72; 392-97; Smith, Notable Black American Women, pp. 457-62; Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers 1746-1933, p. 56.

From Black Firsts: 4,000 Ground-Breaking and Pioneering Events by Jessie Carney Smith, © 2013 Visible Ink Press®. A celebration of achievement, accomplishments and pride.