The last time I saw the late Toni Morrison speak was in 2016; she was on a panel with the poet Sonia Sanchez and the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, and they talked about art and social change. The conversation was far-reaching, and I can’t recall everything discussed. What I do remember is how Morrison responded: She told a story with each reply. When asked about the inspiration behind her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, she recalled details about a childhood friend who didn’t believe in God; it felt as if we were right there with her in the memory. The expansiveness of her answers transformed the abstraction of faith into a tangible experience. Further, it demonstrated to me how Morrison built worlds—how she took ideas and turned them into places for audiences to inhabit—allowing readers to connect with the humanity in her characters.

Morrison, who died in 2019, carved out a space for the Black literary tradition by using the lyricism and folk myths found in Black Americans’ oral customs. “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning,” Morrison wrote in her 1986 essay, “The Site of Memory,” “it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.” What may feel like magic to the reader is the result of intellectual labor, intuition, and capacious empathy on Morrison’s part. And an exhibit at Princeton University grants visitors a glimpse into that creative process, the way Morrison rendered the ordinary, the fantastic, the macabre, and the divine in her works of fiction. That she was a meticulous researcher is no surprise to those of us who’ve encountered the precision in her work. But her personal collection, now on display, shows what she actually prioritized in her fiction. It reveals her obsessions.

Curated by Autumn Womack, an assistant professor of English and African American studies at Princeton, the exhibit features Morrison’s private papers and materials from the university’s archive (Morrison was a professor there from 1989 until 2006). Among the 75 objects on view are the first and last pages of an unpublished short story titled “Gia,” with iterative signatures of her given name, Chloe, before she settled on her nom de plume, Toni; early correspondences between Morrison and editors at Doubleday and Macmillan who offered notes on The Bluest Eye; sketches envisioning 124 Bluestone Road, the home haunted by the baby ghost in Beloved; and drawings that map out the fictional Oklahoma town and convent in Paradise, alongside real snapshots of Oklahoma’s landscape.

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But one of the most remarkable displays are the waterlogged and charred pages from Morrison’s diaries that contain the early drafts, character sketches, and plot outlines for Song of Solomon, Morrison’s 1977 epic about the family Dead’s journey to recover their identity. These items were believed to have been destroyed in a 1993 fire at the writer’s upstate New York home, until they were recovered in 2021 by Princeton archivists. Morrison filled multiple day planners and journals from the fall of 1974 into 1975: Her handwriting strokes are fluid and hurried on some pages, perhaps reflecting the fact that she was also the full-time working mother of two young boys. In later interviews, Morrison said that her father’s death helped her imagine Song of Solomon. She turned to the music and language of early- to mid-20th-century Black Americans who, like her father, migrated north yet still held deep memories of the South.

One of the most remarkable displays are the waterlogged and charred pages from Morrison’s diaries that contain the early drafts, character sketches, and plot outlines for Song of Solomon. (Brandon Johnson)

Morrison’s personal recollections were where she drew inspiration for some of her most memorable characters. The exhibition also includes a 133-minute video from 1987 featuring Morrison in conversation with the psychologist Sigmund Koch and the scholar Hortense Spillers. Viewers learn that Morrison was part of a writers’ group while she was a professor at Howard University. In a coffee shop one Saturday afternoon, she wrote a short story (that later became The Bluest Eye) and presented the draft to her writing group immediately afterward. Morrison was haunted by her aforementioned childhood friend’s rejection of God (because her prayers for blue eyes hadn’t been answered), which led the author to significant questions about slavery’s legacy.

Morrison’s fixation on what the scholar Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery” is a main focus of the exhibit. It’s widely known that the inspiration for Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was an 1856 news clipping of the story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who freed herself via the Underground Railroad and killed one of her children to prevent them from being taken back into slavery. But the Princeton papers indicate that Morrison had plans to extend the titular character’s narrative beyond a single book to three novels spanning decades. In a section of the exhibition called “Wondering and Wanderings,” visitors learn that as troubled as Morrison was by Garner’s story, she was similarly disturbed by the funerary portraiture of the Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee, which explores the morbid parts of Black life. Summary pages show Morrison’s plan for Beloved’s expanded story: The second book would have placed the ghost in the 1920s with another family, drawing inspiration from one of Van Der Zee’s photos (a girl in a coffin) and exploring the idea of Garner’s self-destruction through self-love. “Who shot you, I’ll tell you tomorrow,” Morrison noted in her conceptual layout, posing questions to divine her characters’ motivations and visualize their world. That original vision for the trilogy didn’t happen, but it explains the thematic links between Beloved and Morrison’s later novels Jazz and Paradise.

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The exhibit underscores the idea that items or facts that other people might have regarded as incidental (the Van Der Zee subject’s death, in this case) became, for Morrison, tools to enrich readers’ imaginations. Morrison listened to jazz records, researched when silencers were made for firearms, studied 1920s Jim Crow laws regarding segregated train cars, and pored over maps of waterways and small towns from 1870s Virginia. She pieced together neglected stories with an eye toward what history ignored, and gave them space to breathe. Still, in the 1987 video, Morrison warned Koch and Spillers about how dangerous it is to immerse oneself in those particulars. “I’d write one sentence and walk around for 20 minutes,” Morrison recalled in the interview, remembering that she had to “soothe something that’s burning [her] hand” because her writing demanded that she go to places “too terrible to relate.” She spoke of how rendering these realities in her work could unsettle her, but that, even though fear remained present, she believed artists must take risks for invention. As a result, she said, she developed strategies to quiet that fear and “get out of the reality you invent.”

Studying Morrison’s documents shows that the deep research and probing questions that characterize her fiction are part of the magic of her books. She channeled empathy and emotion through distant artifacts, and used relics from the past to add texture to her characters’ inner lives. Her archival materials demonstrate not just the potency of her thinking but also the care and meticulousness required for literary mastery. Most important, the exhibit shows the personal connection Morrison had to her work: She mined her own life to help readers better understand themselves and their world.

When we were in our 20s, my friend Jim Ferguson would say that if you find yourself living someplace where you need to own a gun, you should move. That made sense to me then; it’s not so easy now to find safe places. If you live in a remote area, it can take the sheriff an hour or more to get to you, so if there’s a deadly threat from an intruder, you are on your own. And the past few years—indeed, the past few weeks—have shown us that gun violence knows no boundaries of geography, socioeconomic status, or age. Wherever you are, violence can find you. This reality has pushed me toward a moral dilemma: I wish no one were armed, but because practically everyone else is, I have a gun myself.

The problem with having a gun is that you can be tempted to use it. Guns also make committing acts of violence seem easier and less personal; if you’re not looking someone in the eye, it may not seem as real when you pull the trigger. To control that risk requires mental and emotional preparation, as well as rigorous training. As a reluctant gun owner, I continue to be baffled by the lack of regulation on gun ownership. Shouldn’t it be at least as difficult to get a gun license as a driver’s license—or better still, as difficult as it is to get a private pilot’s license? Gun owners should have to prove their competency and their ability to exercise good judgment, just as other licenses require. Responsible gun owners will consider every other alternative before pulling out a gun, even in states such as California that have a “castle doctrine” that permits, in certain circumstances, a homeowner to use force (including deadly force) in self-defense against an intruder. Gun owners’ first thought should always be to avoid confrontations in the first place, and they should have a clear understanding of when using a firearm for self-defense is acceptable.

I realize that the phrase responsible gun owner has become a trope of the gun-rights lobby, but behind the cliché, it can actually mean something. Every two years, I take six hours of firearms training with an off-duty police detective. Most of the day is spent on finding ways to remove myself from a dangerous situation before things escalate. Can I run? Can I hide? Running and hiding are not cowardice; they mean taking the higher moral ground of avoiding confrontation in a situation where the person seemingly threatening you might be drunk, or off their meds, or simply confused about which is their car or the right address.

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I am not talking about hypotheticals. Look at the string of recent incidents in the news: the 20-year-old woman shot for being in a car that turned into the wrong driveway, the teenage boy shot for ringing the wrong doorbell, the cheerleaders shot for getting in the wrong car in a supermarket parking lot, the 6-year-old girl shot while trying to retrieve a basketball from her neighbor’s yard. Do these gun owners feel justified in shooting because an unwanted person came too close, invaded their space? I have been in situations when I felt threatened and pulled out my gun. But that is what the training is for: You should shoot someone only as a last resort, you’re taught. You should not shoot just because you feel wronged or scared and can’t control your fear or frustration.

My education as a liberal gun owner began when my 70-year-old mother, living in Bel Air, Los Angeles, felt that she needed to get a pistol. My sister and I were against it, figuring that if she ever tried to use it, the most likely outcome would be that she would shoot my father. Despite our objections, she bought herself a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. That same day, my father bought himself a Remington 870 12-gauge, double-barreled shotgun (I assumed to defend himself from intruders, not from my mother).

Neither of my parents ever ended up using their gun, so far as I know, in any real-life situation. But the sort of home invasion they feared happened to my wife, Heather, and me, at our house in Hollywood. After that traumatic experience, we made the wrenching decision to keep a firearm in our home. Heather, a very logical neuroscientist, reluctantly agreed that it was warranted; we came to an understanding about my having the gun by which Heather said, in effect, “I can accept this; I just don’t want to be reminded of it.” By this time, my mother was 80 and complaining of arthritis, and so I suggested that she let me borrow her Smith & Wesson—just until her arthritis cleared up, we said. It’s not the gun I would have bought for myself, but I kept it. I didn’t like the idea of selling it in case it wound up in the hands of someone who might use it in a crime (even though California is one of the few states that maintains a central database of firearms transfers); so I preferred to hold on to my mom’s pistol and registered it in my name.

Two years later, another intruder entered our property. As I’ve previously described, I was sitting at my desk one morning, looking out at the garden, and I saw a man peering into the windows and doors, trying each of them to see if they were unlocked. I called the police and told them what was going on. I didn’t know if the man was armed, if he had lockpicking tools, or even if I had remembered to lock all the doors and windows.

[From the December 2012 issue: The case for more guns (and more gun control)]

“We’re too busy to come out now,” the dispatcher said, “but call us back if he gets in the house.” To that, I said: “I am armed, and I’m worried that if he gets into the house, I may not have the time to call you, and there may be a much bigger mess here for you to clean up.” She said someone would be there in 20 minutes (an eternity when you’re on alert).

I got out my mother’s gun, took a deep breath, and started to run through different scenarios. If the intruder was armed, I might have to shoot him. I would have to live knowing that I had killed a man—justifiably, according to the law—but I’d spend the rest of my life wondering if there had been other options. There was a more practical issue: I am a good shot, but I’m no professional—how would I perform in a high-stress situation against someone who may do this for a living?

I snuck out through the garage with the .357 in my waistband and waited on the corner for the police. When the patrol car arrived, I held my hands out in front of me, palms facing them, and told them I was the one who’d called, and that I had a gun in my waistband. “Thanks for telling us,” the lead officer said. “Just don’t reach for it.” They went to the house and found the man still trying to get in; they arrested him without violent incident.

Afterwards, the officer suggested that I’d do better protecting our home with a shotgun—you’re more likely to hit and stop an assailant, he explained, when you’re under pressure. My father had never even taken his Remington out of the case, and he agreed to let me “borrow” that too. Heather adapted to having the second gun in the house as long as I took care of it and she didn’t have to think about it.

Since then, we have not had another burglary or forced entry. But a couple of harrowing incidents did occur because of a “destination stalker” who slept in her car for a month in our neighborhood in hopes of finding me. When she did, she told me that the world was going to end in 2035 because of something involving music and the brain, and that I, as a neuroscientist who had written on that subject, was the only person in the world who could help her warn people. The LAPD got involved. (This being Hollywood, the department has a dedicated stalker unit.)

The police detective knew from the state registry that I had firearms—and he was glad to hear that I did. When the police are happy you have a gun, you know there is more violent crime than they can handle. (I am keenly aware that if I were a person of color, my conversation with the police could have been very different.)

I hope I never need to use my guns. My wife and I would like to live in a country where everyone feels that way. But how can we hope to remove the guns from American society, the firearms in so many homes like ours? We can’t. That is the conundrum we face: The individual’s decision to be armed feels rational, maybe is rational, but the societal sum of all those individual decisions is madness. That is the country, the place, we live in now.

I have spent my career studying the way the human brain works and how it can be influenced, including by stress. We know that when individuals are extremely stressed, their decision-making can be impaired, leading to impulsive or irrational behavior. When someone has a firearm, a single moment of impaired judgment can have devastating consequences. Just this week, a driver raced through a stop sign at a crosswalk in my neighborhood at 50 miles per hour, almost knocking me and my dog over. I didn’t have my gun, but for a moment I wanted to shoot at his tires.

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Wanting and doing should be very different things. My firearms instructor repeats the mantra: Never pull out the gun unless you are facing an undeniable threat to human life. Not “I am feeling uncomfortable,” or “This might be threatening,” but an unambiguously imminent danger. “Okay,” he says. “You shot someone in self-defense. There will almost certainly be a trial, and the judge and jury will be asking themselves, Did he have any other options at all?” Practicing all this in your head, and feeling it in your heart, are key—so that when the adrenaline kicks in, you can rely on your training.

One night, when we knew the stalker was still lurking in the neighborhood, we heard a loud, insistent pounding on our front door. I locked the door to our bedroom and called the police. Heather suggested that I try to find a clear path out of the house; meanwhile, she’d stay in the bedroom. I agreed, but I wasn’t going to leave her unarmed. I handed her the shotgun. She held it for the first time. One of the things I love about Heather is her unflagging idealism; another thing I love is that when push comes to shove, she is very practical.

The police came and we didn’t have to use our firearms after all. But reality had forced Heather to do something she never imagined she would do and really didn’t want to. We at least had the solace of each other’s company, straddling the line of this impossible moral quandary of gun ownership.

The small, sickly African girl who arrived in Boston on a seafaring vessel in 1761 had already been stripped of her family and her home. She missed her father, who suffered after having his young child “snatched,” she would later lament in writing. She longed for her mother, whose morning libations to the sun had imprinted on her an enduring memory. She was naked beneath her only physical covering, a “dirty carpet.” She owned nothing, not even herself.

A little over a decade later, this same girl, named Phillis Wheatley after the slave ship that had transported her (the Phillis) and the enslavers who had purchased her (Susanna and John Wheatley), was an author. Her widely read 1773 book of verse, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was striking in its creativity and spoke up for Black humanity. In his erudite, enlightening new biography, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, the historian David Waldstreicher points out that the remarkable and unlikely story of this Revolutionary-era Black celebrity, who was both highlighted and castigated for her race, turns on such reversals and contradictions. Wheatley emerges in these pages as a literary marvel. Waldstreicher’s comprehensive account is a monument to her prowess.

Wheatley was a child prodigy. This is immediately and abundantly clear in Waldstreicher’s treatment and that of others, such as the soaring series of poems about Wheatley written by the poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis. Jeffers’s deeply researched work of visionary verse begins with a tribute line by Langston Hughes: “This is a song for the genius child.” Phillis (and it is still painful to refer to her by that slave-ship name) had the kind of nimble mind that seems rare in any time period. Soon after she was brought to the Wheatleys’ fine house on King Street to work as a personal maid to Susanna (who had recently lost her 7-year-old daughter and was likely seeking some sort of replacement in the captive African girl), she showed an interest in the shape of letters and exhibited a hunger for learning. Susanna doted on the child, who was also her servant and property. Either Susanna; her eldest surviving daughter, Mary Wheatley; or both tutored Phillis in the lingua franca of the British empire.

Wheatley became a wordsmith of English—the language that had been used by her captors to catalog and register her, to record her sale on Boston’s shore, to exclude her from inheritance in the Wheatley estate after she had served the family for decades and brought them more glory than they ever would have achieved on their own. Through her mastery of language, her consciousness of political developments, and her astute sense of timing, Wheatley became, as Waldstreicher’s treatment shows, an informal poet laureate of the American Revolutionary age.

The greatest achievement of Waldstreicher’s biography is the portrayal of Wheatley as a serious poet. She wrote elegies for the dead, lyrics of Christian salvation, tributes to great figures, dramas of storms and sea travel, and, charmingly, riddles with political punch lines. She was an artist who seems to have answered an inner drive to create on the page, even as she was compelled to comply with the calls of her owners and members of their social set for poems on specific subjects and to respond to her own savvy sense of who in the Boston and British orbits should be commemorated.

Wheatley was a student who read classic works of European literature, from the ancient verse of Homer to the early-modern writings of Alexander Pope. She was a craftsperson who selected her subjects, attended to form, traded in classical references and literary allusions, and engaged in wordplay and ironic misdirection. She was a political commentator who saw words and ideas as battlegrounds for the high-stakes issues of her day. And she never forgot her African family or abandoned the cause of Black freedom. Wheatley wrote from her whole experience, out of fractured memory, and with a compassionate heart, asserting with every stroke of her quill that she was a thinking, feeling, political subject who should not be enslaved.

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But Wheatley made this daring assertion about herself and her race at a time when the sale and purchase of Black people was a bustling trade in Boston, when Black intellectual incompetence was assumed, when an escalating crisis between the American colonies and Great Britain heightened debate about the future status of slavery itself. As an owned person belonging to a subjugated racial caste who had to please her captor-benefactors, the poet Wheatley faced an impossible task. Waldstreicher teases out these tangled threads and more, demonstrating Wheatley’s constrained position and how, from that tight spot, she waged ideological and political warfare with her words. “Writing is fighting by other means,” Waldstreicher contends. And Wheatley, Boston’s well-armed bard, was “a patriot poet and a political subject of Britain and New England.”

The version of Wheatley that Waldstreicher paints is the one I’ve always wished I’d known. What Black student (especially if she aspires to be a writer) can forget the first encounter with Wheatley’s famous (or infamous) poem, “On Being Brought From Africa to America”? I met this poem during college in a challenging African American–literature survey course, in which our lectures emphasized the complexity of African American subjectivities and the double-voiced discourses of the Black literary tradition. Nevertheless, I cringed when reading it silently to myself in a dorm room, and again when hearing it read aloud, the words echoing through the lecture hall. “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land / Taught my benighted soul to understand / That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too, ” Wheatley had professed. I pleaded with Wheatley, the first African American to publish a book and one of the first North American women to publish a book of poetry: Certainly, you could not mean you were glad to be enslaved. Surely, you must not mean that slavery was a saving grace. Wheatley did not answer, so I argued with myself as I parsed her line describing “Negros, black as Cain.” This cannot be right. This cannot be all. This cannot be. Something was amiss beneath the surface of her seemingly placid poem, but it was hard for me to pinpoint what or where, to name the mechanics of literary resistance.

As a senior historian of early America with a love of poetry (which runs in the family, according to the book’s acknowledgments) Waldstreicher possesses the right tool kit for disassembling Wheatley’s words. He argues with absolute and convincing confidence that Wheatley harbored a political as well as poetical will, which she directed toward securing her survival, her emancipation, and the freedom of what she called her “sable” race—even as she came to side with the imperfect American colonies against Great Britain. Hers was political poetry. She successfully navigated her social context, in which one wrong move, one misplaced word, could lead to the withdrawal of her owners’ support for her writing, or even to her sale. She wielded her words with exacting control out of necessity. Many of Wheatley’s phrases and lines that seem disparaging of Africa or Black people can be read as sarcastic or sardonic, Waldstreicher shows, especially when placed beside her other writings, such as letters to friends and associates of color—like the enslaved woman Obour Tanner and the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom—and rediscovered poems.

Through close readings of Wheatley’s known work and an astonishing retrieval of several poems published anonymously (which Waldstreicher acknowledges may or may not have been written by Wheatley), Waldstreicher slowly unveils the person behind the pen. I needed to dust off my metaphorical handbook of literary terms to follow Waldstreicher’s references, but the effort was worth it. He seems to have done the same while reading Wheatley in order to catalog and address an array of classical and early-modern figures she references, ancient gods and goddesses she names, and lyrical formulations she adopts.

While tracing Wheatley’s evolution as a poet, Waldstreicher also explains why her writing has been devalued over time. Many modern readers find the rhyming-couplet form (one of Wheatley’s favorites) trite and simplistic, when this was an appreciated type of verse in Wheatley’s time. Beyond this, poetry overall has ceased to be the dominant form of private and public expression that it once was. As Waldstreicher puts it, poems of the late 18th century were like the tweets of today: omnipresent, constrained by form (rhythmic schemes then, 280 characters now), part of public culture. His painstaking interpretations equal Wheatley’s own intentional verse, making it a joy to follow along as he unpacks her words and their arrangement, instructing us to read a line of Wheatley’s and then read it again with an eye roll to see how the meaning changes. When Wheatley writes about race, Waldstreicher shows, she is often mocking a racist or hypocritical point of view that she personally disavows.

If The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley is principally a literary biography, it is simultaneously and forcefully a political history of race and slavery in Revolutionary-era America. It is full of illuminating and specific insights about how slavery figured into colonial politics and how individual Black people played significant roles in events as they unfolded. Waldstreicher routinely points out the “countervailing trends” in Boston and New England that indicated both a weakening and strengthening of the rationale for and practice of slavery as the political winds changed. He compares the “stranger” status of outcast enslaved people in Boston to that of the reviled British soldiers sent to occupy the city. He highlights the ways that patriot leaders began to assume Black collusion with the British and projected fears about a Black fifth column that made Black residents more vulnerable. He notices that the street soldiers of Boston’s defense during the siege, those who taunted British soldiers and caused public ruckuses, were young people of Wheatley’s generation, and that age was a demographic factor that meaningfully intersected with race and class—young people in general being more willing to openly resist colonial rule. In showing how deeply enmeshed Wheatley was with Boston, Waldstreicher also illustrates how tightly woven the story of American liberty and Black American slavery truly were.

Slavery informed Americans’ understanding of the meaning of freedom. The fact of Black captivity at the hands of American colonists made the British threat of unfettered control seem all too real, even as their subjugation of Black people weakened the patriots’ argument in defense of liberty. American freedom and Black slavery were bound together. And, as Waldstreicher shows, Black patriots like Wheatley, who was both African and American, knew this to be the case.

Wheatley observed and recorded in verse the great swirl of events in the Revolutionary hub that was Boston. She wrote poems about youth killed in the Boston streets, fallen patriot soldiers, British naval commanders, and George Washington. She wrote a poem titled “America,” and if Waldstreicher’s attribution of an exciting unsigned work is correct, she wrote a poem about the Boston Massacre and therein named Crispus Attucks, the Afro-Native man who was the first to fall in the conflict. She commented with sophistication on the occurrences of her times and somehow managed to fold in rhyme. After the publication of her book and a visit to London, Wheatley gained her freedom.

[Read: A view of American history that leads to one conclusion]

By the time Waldstreicher recounts Thomas Jefferson’s snide attack on Wheatley in Notes on the State of Virginia (she died before its publication), he has shaped a biography that makes Wheatley’s gifts clear and Jefferson’s desperation palpable. Jefferson was a slaveholder who recognized the practice as a moral wrong and yet needed to justify chattel slavery and Black exclusion by asserting racial inferiority. When Jefferson besmirched Wheatley by saying she lacked originality of thought and was merely an imitator of others as evidence of his inferiority theory, he was being disingenuous. Or perhaps Wheatley’s sly insertion of penetrating insights in seemingly accommodating verse went over Jefferson’s head, as it has so many of ours.

Like that of other Black geniuses in earlier eras, Wheatley’s life was no crystal stair. When John Wheatley died in 1778, he left her nothing. Her most valuable piece of property was the book she had written. Soon after, she married a free Black merchant and took his name, becoming Phillis Wheatley Peters. The couple seem to have had at least one child; they then fell into debt and poverty. Wheatley may have died in a boardinghouse alone. Even as he retells this last phase of Wheatley’s life, Waldstreicher warns that this tragic version of events, which comes mostly from the white Wheatley family line, is far from complete.

The same cannot be said for The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley. This book does the complexity of Wheatley’s life and work justice. But while thorough, the narrative is not immersive in the way of some other historical biographies swimming in setting and character sketches. One never feels as though the texture and verve of 18th-century Boston are fully captured. Waldstreicher speaks, at times, with a utilitarian directness that may have stemmed from a desire to write accessibly, especially as a means of balancing out the thick passages of literary criticism. Sometimes this leads him to turns of phrase that diminish the gravity of his subject matter, such as his indelicate suggestion that children like Wheatley were “pawned” by their African parents, his reference to “Boston-baked slavery” (which brings to mind baked beans), and his comment that Wheatley seems to (but does not) throw Africa “under the proverbial bus.”

There is, besides these minor slippages, another instance that seems askew. Although Waldstreicher spends hundreds of pages meticulously portraying Wheatley in the richness of her context and tracing the intricacies of her intellectual contemporaries and antecedents, he chooses not to do the same for his own predecessors and interlocutors. It is possible to read this book without realizing that the author is building on the work of others, as all scholarship does. Only at the very end, nearly on the final page, do readers learn any real detail about the generations of Black clubwomen and Black women writers, and about the modern-day Black poets, whose revival of Wheatley’s legacy and engagement with her poetry made Waldstreicher’s investigation possible. Given that this book is about the historical importance, impact, and dismissal of Black talent, the editorial decision to drop these names in at the end is disappointing.

Still, Waldstreicher has done more than his part. There can now be no doubt of Wheatley’s importance not only to African America but also to the country and culture as a whole. She was a learned, dexterous wielder of the written word in a taut political and racial moment. “Hers is an African diaspora story, a British story, a New England story, and an American story,” Waldstreicher writes. With patient skill, Waldstreicher demonstrates what we should have seen all along. Wheatley is among the greatest thinkers of her age, and her writing should join the American canon of Revolutionary literature alongside the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the rest, as a testament to the entwined contestations of that consequential era.

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