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Harriet E. Wilson
1825–1900
Best known for the 1859 novel Our Nig, she wrote one of the earliest published novels by an African American woman in the United States. Her life and work were largely forgotten for decades before being rediscovered and recognized as an important part of American literary history.
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About the author
Born free in New Hampshire around 1825, Harriet E. Wilson was an African American writer whose life was marked by hardship from an early age. She is best known for Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, published in 1859, a book that drew on painful experiences of racism and indentured servitude in the North.
Our Nig is now widely valued for showing that racial injustice was not only a Southern story. The novel disappeared from view for many years, but scholars later brought it back into public attention, and it is now considered a landmark in American and African American literature.
Wilson also worked as a lecturer and was associated at times with spiritualist circles later in life. Today, she is remembered for turning a difficult personal history into a powerful work that expanded the story of 19th-century America.