Jupiter Hammon, the first black writer to publish in America, has been one of the least understood and most undervalued writers among those in the tradition that he engendered. Facts about his life are hidden in the lost records of slavery; and his cries for freedom, veiled in biblical language, are further obscured by modern unfamiliarity with that context. A slave all his long life, Hammon nonetheless distinguished himself as a preacher among his people, as a well-known folk, religious, and occasional poet in rural New York, and as an essayist who was invited to speak to and publish for both black and white audiences. Hammon's extant works are extensive, considering that he was a slave with little formal education and no sustained support from the abolition movement, such as that which Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano would later enjoy. Evidence indicates that he wrote much more than...