This chapter considers some of the earliest writers in the Black literary tradition in order to explore the limitations of print publication. Books by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant were funded by proslavery British evangelicals associated with Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. As she was publishing Black authors, Huntingdon also invested huge sums in the African slave trade and enslaved dozens of people on her plantation in Georgia. I argue that Huntingdon’s patronage helps explain troubling opinions about slavery voiced by the writers she promoted, most notoriously those in Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The chapter compares books like Wheatley’s with the writings of an unknown Black writer also associated with Huntingdon: the preacher David Margrett. Huntingdon funded Margrett on a missionary trip to Georgia but fired him after he gave a radical antislavery sermon declaring that “God will deliver his own people from slavery.” Margrett’s sermon survives only in private letters written by white people who sought to silence him. Comparing Margrett’s unpublished sermon with the books Huntingdon promoted illuminates the pressures Black authors strategically faced when they argued for their humanity in a medium controlled by white patrons.

This chapter argues that textual fluidity may be understood as a fundamental component of early Black Atlantic literature, texts orally related or written by individuals of African descent, predominately those first published before 1800. Early Black Atlantic orators and writers revised their texts for various purposes; nonauthorial subjects also regularly altered the literature for a variety of reasons. New – and needed – discoveries concerning the publishing and reception histories of early Black Atlantic literature emerge when unauthorized, posthumous, and abridged editions are studied with the same rigor as authorized editions. By employing this approach, Lamore offers fresh insights on the publishing histories of John Marrant’s, Olaudah Equiano’s, and Venture Smith’s autobiographical narratives.

This chapter argues that eighteenth-century African Atlantic authors perceived in the lives of Black people, distorted and destroyed by the slave system, a chaos that could be understood, protested, and then converted into a transition to a better Black world. The key to this understanding was Reformed Christian religion, and the guides to this transition were supposed to be religiously informed writers. Texts of early African Atlantic authors treat the changes they observed in the lives of Black people, for example, in the human body being reproduced in new sexual and labor regimes, in foods consumed in West Africa and the Americas, and in music as performed in old and new contexts. The telos of Black lives was a divinely inspired utopia, one millenarian version of which was Sierra Leone. Black authors responded to one another concerning their visions of holy goals for their people. The persistence of the slave system and new forms of racism crushed concrete efforts to create new Black societies in places like Sierra Leone. Yet textual interactions – these Black authors responding to one another – constituted the origins of the African American literary tradition. Black millenarian letters closed the eighteenth century; Black literature opened the nineteenth century.

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.

Lamore examines revisions found in the full-length and abridged editions of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative published in the United States, and contends that they serve as a type of textual signature; they record how the editor and/or book publisher revised the autobiography to appeal to different readers in the United States. The US publishing history of Equiano's Narrative demonstrates that whereas the publishing history of the authorized editions of the autobiography underscores Equiano’s successful attempts to control his life, text, and self, the publishing history of the US editions of the autobiography repeatedly reveals that his life, text, and self were edited by others. For Lamore, the editing of an autobiographical text by a non-authorial agent forms an essential part of its reception history and the history of the multiple actors present in published life narratives. The publishing history of A Narrative of the Lord’s Most Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a frequently read eighteenth-century autobiography related by a free person of African descent, provides another occasion to study unauthorized editions of transatlantic autobiography.

This chapter argues the writings published by Blacks in the early national US must be understood in relation to the history of slavery in the British Empire. The author examines diverse forms of African American literature, which were focused on transatlantic concerns, such as “Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade” (1808–1823), given annually on January 1. These texts tell powerful stories of the history of the slave trade, and particularly its violence to familial ties, from the trade’s inception in the fifteenth century until its abolition in 1808. Written by free Black churchmen and intellectuals in New York and Philadelphia, including Absalom Jones, Peter Williams, Jr., Russell Parrot, and William Hamilton, these orations demonstrate a deep interest in the actions of the British Parliament and the state of slavery in the West Indies. This chapter also considers direct allusions to British and Afro-British abolitionists and their writings, from Clarkson and Wilberforce to Equiano, in the work of William Miller, Russell Parrot, William Whipper, David Walker, Maria Stewart, and others. The chapter concludes with a discussion of The History of Mary Prince (1831), the most important slave narrative to emerge from the British colonies and questions the inclusion of Prince’s narrative in a history of African American literature.