Harriet E. Wilson

HEW , the first black woman to publish a novel—Hannah Crafts may have written the first one,—in the USA, created the form for such novels by subverting the form of fiction offered her by white writers and drawing on the already-existent tradition of black autobiography. Her work is both a sentimental novel and a bildungsroman, as well as a narrative of personal survival through persecution and degradation. Since HEW disappeared from the records soon after her publication, the status of her novel as her only work is assumed but not proven.