Harriet E. Wilson was perhaps the first African American to publish a novel in America. In Boston on 5 September 1859 Wilson published Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There. By "Our Nig," with the George C. Rand and Avery Company. The only work Wilson is known to have authored, Our Nig depicts the pernicious effects of slavery on a young, black indentured servant girl during her life with a white family in antebellum New England and, by extension, offers a critique of Northern abolitionist hypocrisy. The novel is significant for its blending of autobiographical elements with the conventions of slave narratives and sentimental fiction, for its unabashed and self-consciously direct appeal for readers to purchase the book, for its portrayal of an interracial marriage, and for its anticipation of crucial themes of...