This new edition of Phillis Wheatley Peters is the first full-length biography of the poet whose remarkable odyssey took her from being a child enslaved in Africa to becoming an international celebrity by the time she was in her early twenties, only to fall into relative obscurity when she died in 1784 at barely the age of thirty. Introduced to Benjamin Franklin in London, praised by her correspondent George Washington, and criticized by Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley (later Peters) laid claim to being the virtual poet laureate during the American Revolution as well as in the new United...