An Outline of American Literature

by Kathryn VanSpanckeren

Early American and Colonial Period to 1776: Jupiter Hammon (c. 1720-c. 1800)

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The black American poet Jupiter Hammon, a slave on Long Island, New York, is remembered for his religious poems as well as for An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York (1787), in which he advocated freeing children of slaves instead of condemning them to hereditary slavery. His poem "An Evening Thought" was the first poem published by a black male in America.

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