This chapter provides background information about the literary mode known as regionalism and explains what is queer about New England regionalism. It analyzes White-authored New England regionalist fiction from the 1865-1915 period, using Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel Deephaven as its primary example, to argue that White-authored New England regionalism imagines independent, queer lives for White women characters, living outside of the heteronuclear family. The chapter then turns to examine the underacknowledged African-American women’s tradition of New England regionalism, a tradition that reworks conventions of the earlier, White-dominated one. This African-American tradition begins in the nineteenth century and extends well into the twentieth: Harriet Wilson, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Dorothy West, and Ann Petry all limn the contours of New England life for Black women, engaging and claiming an inheritance of defiant, queer New England character while exploring the limitations and violence of that inheritance when understood as only available to White people.

This chapter focuses on biographies that illuminate the personal stories of African descendants born in the United States and are currently in print. Green provides a sample of biographies of Black leaders and cultural icons, from Charles Chesnutt’s study of the life of Frederick Douglass, published four years after Douglass’s death. She pinpoints major approaches to the study of African American life in the United States and identifies several subgenres of biography. Much of African American biography relies heavily on archival material — diaries and scrapbooks stored in Black homes, donations to libraries and civic centers, old letters saved by past lovers, interviews of friends and acquaintances, journals left behind by the dead — housed in various venues across the world. A major challenge of the biographer, then, is to write a story that interests and informs, and also shows the significance of the subject's life story; or in other words, to show a balance between the extraordinariness and the ordinariness of the life narrative subject. The chapter ends with suggestions of challenges for producing biographies in the future.