The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley
A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times notable book of 2023 | A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography
“[An] erudite, enlightening new biography . . . [Waldstreicher’s] interpretations equal Wheatley’s own intentional verse, making it a joy to follow along as he unpacks her words and their arrangement.” —Tiya Miles, The Atlantic
“Thoroughly researched, beautifully rendered and cogently argued . . . The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley is [. . .] historical biography at its best.” —Kerri Greenidge, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
A paradigm-shattering biography of Phillis Wheatley, whose extraordinary poetry set African American literature at the heart of the American Revolution.
Admired by George Washington, ridiculed by Thomas Jefferson, published in London, and read far and wide, Phillis Wheatley led one of the most extraordinary American lives. Seized in West Africa and forced into slavery as a child, she was sold to a merchant family in Boston, where she became a noted poet at a young age. Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, she composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, praised warriors, and used her verse to variously lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. “Can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?” By doing so, she added her voice to a vibrant, multisided conversation about race, slavery, and discontent with British rule; before and after her emancipation, her verses shook up racial etiquette and used familiar forms to create bold new meanings. She demonstrated a complex but crucial fact of the times: that the American Revolution both strengthened and limited Black slavery.
In this new biography, the historian David Waldstreicher offers the fullest account to date of Wheatley’s life and works, correcting myths, reconstructing intimate friendships, and deepening our understanding of her verse and the revolutionary era. Throughout The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, he demonstrates the continued vitality and resonance of a woman who wrote, in a founding gesture of American literature, “Thy Power, O Liberty, makes strong the weak / And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Waldstreicher (Slavery's Constitution), a history professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, delivers a magisterial biography of 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784). Tracing Wheatley's trajectory from a promising student to a national celebrity, he explores her development as an artist and focuses on how Wheatley crafted "subversive" meanings and considered "piety, politics, and race" in her work. He begins in 1761 with Wheatley's arrival by slave ship in Boston, where as a young girl she was enslaved by the Wheatley family until they granted her freedom in 1773, shortly after the publication of her first poetry collection. Waldstreicher excels at teasing out the subtle political messages within Wheatley's poetry, contending, for instance, that "On Being Brought from Africa to America" satirizes the racism critics accuse it of perpetuating. The author candidly addresses gaps in the historical record, such as when he constructs a plausible account of the under-documented last six years of Wheatley's life, when her marriage to a domineering grocer took her out of the limelight. The historical scholarship dazzles and the incisive analysis of Wheatley's poetry suggests she had a more "liberatory political agenda" than she's often credited for. The result is an indispensable take on an essential early American poet.
