By the early 1800s, African American literature appeared in a number of forms. White abolitionists encouraged the writing and publication of slave narratives, such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs. Often, illiterate African American slaves were encouraged to tell their life stories to white writers who wrote them down. African American abolitionists produced nonfiction, such as Nat Turner’s pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), and drama, such as William Wells Brown’s The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom (1858), the first African American play.
In 1859, Harriet E. Wilson published Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, the first novel published in the United States by an African American. Poets such as Frances Watkins Harper captured the horror of the institution of slavery. Other black writers, such as Frederick Douglass and David Walker, used the podium and essays to promote the right of African Americans to freedom and equality. Educated African Americans kept journals of their daily activities.
From its beginning to the Civil War, the African American literary tradition was built and focused on a quest for freedom and equality. This quest has continued to serve as a foundation for much of the African American literary effort to this day.
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In the realm of the spirit, most whites were content with African American claims to an equal right to God’s grace, as long as African American salvation did not entail a radical redemption of the white-dominated social order. In the political sphere, however, whites presumed themselves alone to be the arbiters of rights and