Henry Louis Gates

Standard Name: Gates, Henry Louis,, Jr

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Frances E. W. Harper
One of the earliest novels penned by an African-American woman, it remains a valuable text for the way in which it so clearly delineates the relationship between the images of black women held at large...
Literary responses Harriet E. Wilson
Henry Louis Gates, Jr finds interesting in the novel the manner in which one discursive field collapses, as it were, into quite another, of a different status.
Wilson, Harriet E. “Introduction”. Our Nig, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Vintage Books, Random House, p. xi - lix.
xxxvi
He hints, though inconclusively, that a handful...
Author summary Frances E. W. Harper
An active lecturer and author in support of abolition, women's rights, and racial equality in the mid-nineteenth century, FEWH was, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr , the first African-American professional woman of letters.
Gates, Henry Louis et al. “Introduction”. Three Classic African-American Novels, Vintage Books, p. vii - xvii.
xii
Textual Features Frances E. W. Harper
FEWH tells the story of Iola Leroy, an upper-class woman living in Reconstruction America who is raised believing that she is white. She eventually discovers that her mother, though an educated and free woman, was...
Textual Production Harriet E. Wilson
In place of author's name on the title-page she repeats the demeaning nickname of the title, Our Nig. In her brief preface HEW acknowledges the tightrope she walks in the likelihood that her story...

Timeline

Some time in the 1850s: Hannah Crafts, a fugitive slave, wrote The...

Writing climate item

Some time in the 1850s

Hannah Crafts , a fugitive slave, wrote The Bondwoman's Narrative; possibly the first novel by a black woman, it reached publication in 2002.

Texts

Gates, Henry Louis et al., editors. “Chronology”. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Amistad, 1993, pp. 311-12.
Curtis, David A., and Harriet E. Wilson. “Chronology of Harriet E. Adams Wilson”. Our Nig, edited by Henry Louis Gates and Henry Louis Gates, Vintage Books, Random House, 1983, p. xiii - xxvii.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Phillis Wheatley. “Foreword: In Her Own Write”. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, edited by John C. Shields and John C. Shields, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. vii - xxii.
Wilson, Harriet E. “Introduction”. Our Nig, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Vintage Books, Random House, 1983, p. xi - lix.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Henry Louis Gates, editors. “Introduction”. The Classic Slave Narratives, Penguin, 1987, p. ix - xviii.
Gates, Henry Louis et al. “Introduction”. Three Classic African-American Novels, Vintage Books, 1990, p. vii - xvii.
Crafts, Hannah. “Introduction”. The Bondwoman’s Narrative, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Warner Books, 2002, p. ix - lxxv.
Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig. Editor Gates, Henry Louis, Vintage Books, Random House, 1983.
Gates, Henry Louis et al. “Phillis Wheatley’s Struggle for Freedom in her Poetry and Prose”. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, edited by John C. Shields, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 229-70.
Gates, Henry Louis et al. “Preface”. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, edited by John C. Shields, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. xxvii - xxxii.
Crafts, Hannah. The Bondwoman’s Narrative. Editor Gates, Henry Louis, Warner Books, 2002.
Wheatley, Phillis, and Henry Louis Gates. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. Editor Shields, John C., Oxford University Press, 1988.
Prince, Mary. “The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave”. The Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Penguin, 1987, pp. 183-38.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay, editors. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Norton, 1997.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, editors. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Amistad, 1993.