author
William Hammon
Best known in literary history as one of the earliest published African American poets, he wrote from the hard reality of enslavement and captivity. His surviving work is small, but it carries unusual historical weight and offers a rare first-person voice from colonial America.
1 Audiobook
Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever
by William Hammon, Matthew Turner
About the author
William Hammon was an enslaved Black writer in colonial North America, and he is often recognized as the first African American to publish poetry in what became the United States. He was enslaved on Long Island in New York, and his best-known work, An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries, appeared in 1761.
Only a small number of writings by Hammon survive, but they are especially important because they preserve one of the earliest Black literary voices in American history. His work is deeply religious, shaped by Christian themes of salvation, suffering, and moral reflection, and it gives modern readers a glimpse of both his faith and the world he lived in.
Hammon also wrote prose and verse later in life, including an address to Black people in New York. Today he is remembered less for a large body of work than for the remarkable fact that his words endured at all, making him a foundational figure in early African American literature.