Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the Americas)

Author(s): Ira Dworkin

Year: 2007

Pauline E. Hopkins (1859–1930) came to prominence in the early years of the twentieth century as an outspoken writer, editor, and critic. Frequently recognized for her first novel, Contending Forces, she emerged as one of the most prolific African American women writers of fiction prior to 1930 and is currently one of the most widely read and studied African American novelists from that period. While nearly all of Hopkins’s fiction remains in print, there is very little of her nonfiction available. This reader brings together dozens of her hard-to-find essays. Also included are longer nonfiction works such as Famous Men of the Negro Race, Famous Women of the Negro Race, The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century, and A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendents, some of which are published here for the first time in their entirety. Through these works, along with two juvenile essays from the 1870s, a personal letter, and two speeches, readers encounter a voice that is committed to constructing an international discourse on race, recovering the militant abolitionist tradition to combat Jim Crow, celebrating black political participation during and after the Reconstruction era, articulating the connections between race and labor, and insisting on equal rights for women. Hopkins’s writing will challenge contemporary scholars to rethink their understanding of black activism and modernity in the early twentieth century.