In this novel set in antebellum America, the Garies--a white southerner, his mulatto slave-turned-wife, and their two children--have moved to Philadelphia from Georgia.

Originally published in London in 1857, The Garies and Their Friends was the second novel published by an African American and the first to chronicle the experience of free blacks in the pre-Civil War northeast. The novel anticipates themes that were to become important in later African American fiction, including miscegenation and -passing, - and tells the story of the Garies and their friends, the Ellises, a...

Gustave de Beaumont's 1835 work, Marie, or Slavery in the United States is structured as a fascinating essay on race interwoven with a novel. It is the story of socially forbidden love between an idealistic young Frenchman and an apparently white American woman with African ancestry. The couple's idealism fades as they repeatedly face racial prejudice and violence, and are eventually forced to seek shelter among exiled Cherokee people. Notable as the first abolitionist novel to focus on racial prejudice rather than bondage as a social evil, Beaumont's work was also the first to link...