Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black [Paperback]

With a New Introduction and Notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Richard J. Ellis

A fascinating fusion of two literary models of the nineteenth century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative,Our Nig, apart from its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in nineteenth-century Massachusetts.

This definitive edition ofOur Nigincludes a new Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Richard J. Ellis and a set of appendices:  Harriet Wilson's Career as a Spiritualist ;  Hattie E. Wilson in theBanner of LightandSpiritual Scientist a collection of her extant contributions to these newspapers;  Documents from Harriet Wilson's Life in Boston, and a compilation of primary source material relating to Wilson's identity.  There is also a new chronology of the life of Harriet Wilson by Richard J. Ellis, as well as an up-to-date Select Bibliography of current scholarship regarding Harriet Wilson. This edition gives the fullest account to date of the life of Harriet Wilson, filling out many critical points regarding her life after writingOur Nig, in particular when she became a medium who communicated with the dead and as an educator in the Spiritualist movement after the Civil War. I sat up most of the night reading and pondering the enormous significance of Harriet Wilson's novel, Our Nig. It is as if we'd just discovered Phillis Wheatley—or Langston Hughes.... She represents a similar vastness of heretofore unexamined experience, a whole new layer of time and existence in American life and literature. —Alice Walker

The story of Henry Louis Gates' discovery of this extraordinary book and his persistent search for the tlÓ#