Wheatley, Phillis.

12mo, first edition, engraved portrait frontispiece, dedication leaf to the Countess of Huntingdon, preface by the author, letter from the author's master,  attestation leaf (often lacking), contemporary calf, spine in six compartments gilt, red morocco label, preserved in quarter brown morocco folding box, frontispiece remargined, some slight browning and offsetting, joints cracked, some slight further wear to edges of binding 

Julia Parker Wightman, bookplate

Brawley 31; Sabin 103136; Wegelin 342J

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, when appropriate.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

first edition of the first book to be published by a black american, with the attestation leaf

"We...do assure the World that the Poems...were...written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivate Barbarian from Africa..."

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) was born in Gambia and became a slave at the age of seven, purchased by the Boston family of John Wheatley, in whose household she served, and who taught her to read and write, and encouraged her poetry. Greatly influenced by the Latin classics and Pope, she began to compose occasional verse and became a "kind of poet-laureate in the domestic circles of Boston" (Brawley). On a trip to England in 1773 she was taken up by the circle of the Countess of Huntingdon, and arrangements were made for publication of Poems on Various Subjects. It was the only collection of her verse to appear in her lifetime, though the author was working on a second collection at the time of her death.

Phillis Wheatley was freed from slavery on 18 October 1773, and subsequently appeared before General Washington for her poetry and became a strong supporter of independence during the Revolutionary War. She married a free black grocer named John Peters, but the marriage subsequently failed, all of her three children died, and she herself died in poverty at the age of 31.