can literature who happen to be of Negro descent
and who are but vaguely to be identified with the
group stream as such.
Both these points of view are interesting but let us first take up the succession of authors who form a group literature by and for Negroes.
As early as the eighteenth century, and even before the Revolutionary War the first voices of Negro authors were heard in the United States. Phyllis Wheatley, the black poetess, was easily the pioneer, her first poems appearing in 1773, and other editions in 1774 and 1793. Her earliest poem was in memory of George Whitefield. She was honored by Washington and leading Englishmen and was as a writer above the level of her American white contemporaries.
She was followed by Richard Allen, first Bishop of the African Methodist Church whose autobiography, published in 1793 was the beginning of that long series of personal appears and narratives of which Booker T. Washington’s “Up From Slavery” was the latest. Benjamin Banneker’s almanacs represented the first scientific work of American Negroes, and began to be issued in 1792.
Coming now to the first decades of the nineteenth century we find some essays on freedom by the African Society of Boston, and an apology for
