A few colonial masters taught their slaves to read so they could partake of the Bible, but it was very rare for any enslaved people to receive as much education as the girl who became known as Phillis Wheatley. Although she spoke no English when she was sold to John Wheatley, but she learned quickly. By 1765 she had composed her first poem.

In October 1770, Phillis wrote an elegy for George Whitefield, a popular Evangelical minister from England, who had died unexpectedly while traveling in Massachusetts. Newspapers in Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia published the poem. Wheatley's elegy reached Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon and a great admirer of the Rev. Whitefield. The countess, in turn, sent Wheatley's poem to London papers, which reprinted it many times.

By the early 1770s, Phillis Wheatley had written enough poems to publish a book. Most whites, however, believed that men and women of African descent lacked intellectual capacity. John Wheatley assembled a group of Boston's most respected citizens, including the governor and John Hancock, to "examine" Phillis and vouch for the poems' authenticity.

The men agreed to write a preface to Phillis's book assuring "the World that the Poems specified in the following Page[s] were (as we verily believe) written by PHILLIS, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town."

Despite this endorsement, the Wheatleys could not find a publisher for the book in the colonies, and the Countess of Huntingdon offered to finance publication in England. The Wheatleys' son accompanied Phillis, still enslaved, to London to help prepare her poems.

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston was published in September 1773; the author was about 20 years old. In its first year, the book was reprinted four times in London. Although her book became available in the colonies the following year, an American edition was not issued until 1786, after Phillis's death. In the remaining years of the eighteenth century, seven editions appeared.

In 1773 the young woman sailed back to Boston. Shortly after Phillis's return, the Wheatleys emancipated her. However, her freedom, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, "enslaved her to a life of hardship" — an all too common fate for a free black woman in eighteenth-century Massachusetts.

John Wheatley was widowed the following year. He left Boston, and Phillis lived for a time with his daughter Mary and her husband. She continued writing, but the outbreak of hostilities between the colonies and England further hampered her ability to make a living as a poet.

Phillis married John Peters in 1778, a free black man about whom little is known. One thing is clear: like most blacks in colonial Massachusetts, the couple found it difficult to get an economic foothold. They lived in poverty. They had two children; both died in infancy. Shortly after their third child was born, John Peters apparently abandoned his wife. Phillis and her newborn died on December 5, 1784. She was about 30 years old.

By 1779 Phillis had written enough poems for a second book, but she had been unable to find subscribers to finance its publication. The manuscript has never been found, but one poem recently came to light. In a heartbreaking irony, Christie's auction house sold it for just under $70,000.

In the years before the Civil War, abolitionists often cited Wheatley's poetry as proof of black men and women's intellectual abilities. Then, as Gates says, she "disappeared from view" for almost a century. Twentieth-century black writers and critics rediscovered her work, but many of them dismissed her as a "Negro poetess [who] so well fits the Uncle Tom syndrome . . . pious, grateful, retiring, and civil," someone who accepted her "degradation." They assailed "On Being Brought from Africa to America," a poem she had written as a teenager, which begins: "'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. . . ."

It is important to remember that Phillis Wheatley was still enslaved when she wrote the poem. Once a free woman, she wrote differently about being "by seeming cruel fate . . . snatch'd from Africa" and prayed "others may never feel tyrannic sway." And in a widely published letter, she insisted in 1774 that "in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and . . . I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us."

In 1773 she had "humbly submitted to the Perusal of the Public" her poems "with all their Imperfections." She was the first American black, male or female, free or enslaved, to do so.