Chapter 12 - Spiritual Autobiography, Past and Present

Summary

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.