Pauline Hopkins

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Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859 – August 13, 1930) was a prominent early African-American novelist, journalist, playwright, and editor. She is considered a pioneer in her use of the romantic novel to explore social and racial themes. Her work is significantly influenced by W.E.B. DuBois.

Hopkins' earliest known work, Slaves' Escape, or the Underground Railroad (also known as Peculiar Sam), first performed in 1880, is one of the earliest-known literary treatments of slaves escaping to freedom. She explored the difficulties faced by African-Americans amid the racist violence of post-Civil War America in her first novel, Contending Forces, published in 1900. She published a number of serial novels over the next sixteen years as well as short stories in African-American periodicals.

Hopkins spent the remainder of her years working as a stenographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hopkins died in Cambridge, Massachusetts from burns sustained in a household accident.

In 1988, Oxford University Press released The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers with Professor Henry Louis Gates as the series' general editor. Hopkins' novel 1900 Contending Forces (with an introduction by Richard Yarborough) and several of her published short stories were reprinted as a part of this collection.

[edit] References

Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide, New Haven, Connecticut: Meridian Books, 1989. ISBN 0-452-00981-2