born с 1753, present-day Senegal or The Gambia?, West Africa
died Dec. 5, 1784, Boston, Mass., U.S.
African American poet and the first African American to publish a book.
She was kidnapped, transported to America, and sold from a slave ship in 1761 to John Wheatley, a Boston merchant. The Wheatleys taught her to read and write English and Latin. At about age 14 she began writing poetry modeled on Alexander Pope and other Neoclassical writers. Her verse
exceptionally mature, if conventional, poetry that was largely concerned with morality and piety
attracted much attention. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), published in England, spread her fame to Europe. Freed in 1773, she married a free black man in 1778. She worked as a servant in her final years and died in poverty.