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Nineteenth-Century African-American Women Writers
From: The New York Public Library
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 espite slavery and post-Civil War barriers to access to education, black Americans in the nineteenth century published fiction, poetry, essays and social critiques. During the last few decades, interest in black women writers, in particular, led The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to make publicly available the full works of many of these little-known writers who created the foundations of African-American women's literature. |
The website, African American Women Writers of the 19th Century (digital.nypl.org/schomburg/writers_aa19/), presents full texts of more than 50 works published in books and pamphlets prior to 1920, accompanied by detailed biographies of the authors and by images of the title pages. The searchable collection includes narratives from escaped slaves (including Sojourner Truth), collections of poems and stories, essays, autobiographies and profiles of nineteenth-century black women. Republished exactly as originally written, these texts provide a unique and rare glimpse into the lives and plights of women who were often ignored by the history books. |
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