Harriet E. Wilson 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 on March 15, 1825 is considered the first woman of African and American descend to become a novelist, as well as the first Black person of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent.
Her fictional autobiography Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-story White House, North was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts, and was not widely known. The novel was discovered in 1982 by the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Much of what is known about the life of Harriet Wilson has been derived from the book, which up until the early 1980s was considered the work of a white author.
The largely autobiographical book turned the literary world on its end because up to that point it had been widely accepted that the first Black published novelist had been Frances Ellen Watkins Harper with Lola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (1892). The Harriet Wilson Project commissioned a statue of Wilson in 2006. Sculpted by Fern Cunningham, the statue is located in Milford, New Hampshire’s Bicentennial Park.
Harriet E Wilson died on June 28, 1900