Eugene O’Neill, and Arthur Miller, Wilson found
a way to bring an authentic African-American ex-
perience to the footlights of America, and in the
process he educated generations already born and
yet to come about the often silent histories of Af-
rican Americans.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bogumil, Mary. Understanding August Wilson.
Charleston: University of South Carolina Press,
1999.
Elkins, Marilyn. August Wilson: A Casebook. New
York: Garland Press, 2000.
Herrington, Joan. I Ain’t Sorry for Nothin’ I Done:
August Wilson’s Process of Playwriting. New York:
Limelight, 1998.
Nadel, Alan, ed. May All of Your Fences Have Gates:
Essays on the Drama of August Wilson. Ames: Uni-
versity of Iowa Press, 1994.
Pereira, Kim. August Wilson and the African-Ameri-
can Odyssey. Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1995.
Shannon, Sandra G. The Dramatic Vision of August
Wilson. Washington, D.C.: Howard University
Press, 1996.
Tracie Church Guzzio
Wilson, Harriet (1828?– )
Harriet Wilson, born Harriet Adams in Milford,
New Hampshire, in 1828 (some sources indicate
1827), was the child of a white mother and an Afri-
can-American father. Little is known about her, the
author of OUR NIG (1854), the first novel published
by an African-American woman and the first Afri-
can-American novel published in North America.
At the time of its publication, Our Nig garnered
Wilson little acclaim or attention. Even less is
known about her whereabouts after the book’s
publication. However, it is known that at age six
she was left with the Hayward family, whom she
fictionalizes as the Bellmonts in the novel. Mis-
treated from the start, Wilson lived virtually as the
Hayward’s indentured servant until she turned 18.
In 1851 Harriet married Thomas Wilson, a con
artist who made money selling his story as a fugi-
tive slave (a story that later proved to be fabricated).
Wilson abandoned Harriet and their son, George;
when George became sick, Harriet was unable to
care for him, so she placed him in a state hospi-
tal. As she explains in the introduction, her novel
represents her attempt to make enough money
to reclaim her son and nurse him back to health.
Unfortunately, the novel did not provide Wilson
with the financial stability she had hoped for; a
few months after its publication, George died, after
which Wilson seems to have disappeared without
a trace.
It was not until the 1980s that Professor HENRY
LOUIS GATES, JR., who recovered Our Nig in 1984
and identified it as an African-American novel,
verified much of Wilson’s life. Wilson’s history and
her novel highlight America’s neglect and mis-
treatment of those marginalized by race, class, and
gender. Home, family, marriage—all the promises
of security offered to orphaned young women in
the sentimental novels that Our Nig alludes to—
could not save Wilson or her son. In the years since
the book’s rediscovery, readers have found a young
mother and writer to admire. Her style and her
examination and criticism of American families,
religious attitudes, and labor issues have made her
an important figure of the past who inspires con-
temporary African-American writers.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jones, Jill. “The Disappearing ‘I’ in Our Nig.” Legacy:
A Journal of American Women Writers 13, no. 1
(1996): 38–53.
White, Barbara. “ ‘Our Nig’ and the She-Devil: New
Information about Harriet Wilson and the ‘Bell-
mont’ Family.” American Literature 65, no. 1
(1993): 19–52.
Tracie Church GuzzioWind Done Gone, The
Alice Randall (2001)
In The Wind Done Gone, ALICE RANDALL sifts pieces
of the antebellum American past into a richly tex-
tured narrative that contests the myths immortal-
ized in the novel Gone with the Wind. Randall’sWind Done Gone, The 557