The remarkable story of Phillis Wheatley, the Boston slave girl, poet of the American Revolution who translated Ovid at fifteen, was received in the best drawing rooms of Boston, was entertained in England by the Countess of Huntington and the Lord Mayor of London, and praised by Tom Paine, John Hancock, and General George Washington.

Phillis read the poets, translated from the Latin, and knew the classics in a day when few women could do more than read and write, for it was not considered necessary or even ladylike for a girl to know more than sewing, housekeeping, and the social graces. That she, a Negro girl, wrote poetry that evoked letters of praise from General George Washington, Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts, and great personages in England, was truly phenomenal.

Phillis wrote poetry because she had to—in it she expressed her love for people, her passion for freedom, and her devout religious fervor. But her unusual story is also the story of the wonderful Wheatley house to which she came as a child of five; of Mrs. Wheatley who rescued her from the slave market; of Mary Wheatley who shared her bedroom with a baby afraid of the dark after three months in the black hold of a slave ship; of Nat, the young Harvard student, who became her mentor and teacher.

Against the background of political unrest, the American struggle for freedom, and Boston, suffering the privations of a besieged city, Shirley Graham tells the dramatic, touching, and tragic story of the young African poet, Phillis, who sang of freedom in an alien land.

From the dust jacket