Description: "This new edition incorporates significant discoveries that Carretta and others have made since the book's initial publication about Wheatley's education, affiliations, activities, publications, marriage, husband, maternity, later years, and the posthumous survival of the manuscript of her proposed second volume of writings. Moreover, this new edition gives Carretta the opportunity to reconsider some previously available evidence"--
Brief description: VINCENT CARRETTA is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor of more than ten books, including scholarly editions of the writings of Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Ignatius Sancho, and Ottobah Cugoano. His books include Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage; Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man; and The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, the First African Anglican Missionary, coedited with Ty M. Reese (all Georgia). He lives in Springfield, Virginia.
Review Quotes: Phillis Wheatley Peters is one of the very few women writers to have invented a literary tradition. Lavishly praised and viciously maligned, the enormity of Wheatley Peters's artistic achievements has long been obscured by the political uses to which she and her poetry have been put. Even more obscured have been the details of Wheatley Peters's life. At last, Vincent Carretta has written a biography of this great writer as complex and as nuanced as Wheatley Peters and her work themselves. This book resurrects the 'mother' of the African American literary tradition, vividly, scrupulously, and without sentimentality, as no other biography of her has done.--Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University "author of The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers"