- Pauline Hopkins
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859 –
August 13 ,1930 ) was a prominent earlyAfrican-American novelist ,journalist ,playwright , and editor. She is considered a pioneer in her use of theromantic novel to explore social and racial themes. Her work is significantly influenced byW.E.B. DuBois .Hopkins' earliest known work, "Slaves' Escape, or the Underground Railroad" (also known as "Peculiar Sam"), first performed in 1880, is one of the earliest-known literary treatments of slaves escaping to freedom. She explored the difficulties faced by African-Americans amid the racist violence of post-Civil War America in her first novel, "Contending Forces", published in 1900. She published a number of serial novels over the next sixteen years as well as short stories in African-American periodicals.
Hopkins spent the remainder of her years working as a
stenographer at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology .Hopkins died in
Cambridge, Massachusetts from burns sustained in a household accident.In 1988,
Oxford University Press releasedThe Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers with Professor Henry Louis Gates as the series' general editor. Hopkins' novel 1900 "Contending Forces " (with an introduction byRichard Yarborough ) and several of her published short stories were reprinted as a part of this collection.References
*Shockley, Ann Allen. "Afro-American Women Writers 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide", New Haven, Connecticut: Meridian Books, 1989. ISBN 0-452-00981-2
External links
* [http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/hopkins_pauline_elizabeth.html Pauline Hopkins's "Voices from the Gaps"]
* [http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5621 Hopkins profile at Literary Encyclopedia]
* [http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap6/hopkins.html Perspectives in American Literature - Pauline Hopkins bibliography]
* [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_3_36/ai_94335193 Pauline Hopkins's critical essay "Of One Blood, Africa, and the 'Darwinist Trap'"]
* [http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/series/TheSchomburgLibraryofNineteenthC/ Home page for The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers]
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