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1 results

  • Chapter 12 - Spiritual Autobiography, Past and Present

  • from Part II - Individuals and Communities
  • Edited by Joycelyn Moody, University of Texas, San Antonio
  • Book:
    A History of African American Autobiography
    Published online:
    30 September 2021
    Print publication:
    22 July 2021, pp 193-207

  • Summary

    May argues African American autobiography became integral to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic cultural world with the publication of Briton Hammon’s 1760 account of his sea travels and captivity. With Hammon's text, the genre expanded to become a literary, political, and economic phenomenon by the time of the 1789 British publication of Olaudah Equiano’s more comprehensive and popular life story. In fact, 1760 is a year, May contends, that marks the beginning of known literature written and published by Black people living in England and British North America, a wide range of genres engaging life writing including slave narratives, captivity narratives, confessionals, pamphlets, poetry, sermons, and jeremiads. African American autobiography captivated the attention of a general readership until the end of the Civil War, a readership constituted mainly of a growing white middle class and elite reading audience.