Abstract
The list of early African American fictions is unexpectedly provisional. Presently it includes “The Heroic Slave” (1853) by Frederick Douglass, Clotel, or the President's Daughter (1853) by William Wells Brown, The Garies and Their Friends (1857) by Frank J. Webb, The Bondwoman's Narrative (1857?) by Hannah Crafts , Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) by Harriet E. Wilson, Blake, Or the Huts of America (1859-62) by Martin R. Delany, and “The Two Offers” (1859) by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. But the list has been evolving. The full text of Blake was not made available until 1969. Our Nig was not identified as an African American novel until 1982; The Bondwoman's Narrative was not discovered to be an African American fiction until 2001. It has been identified by several kinds of forensic and scholarly tests as a manuscript written by an escaped slave woman. On the authority of its finder, Henry Louis Gates Jr., it is proper to treat that manuscript as authentic, but it is so newly found that it is also proper to retain the possibility that it might prove to be otherwise.
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