Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins

Born into an educated free black family in Portland Maine Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859-1930) was a pioneering playwright journalist novelist feminist and public intellectual best known for her 1900 novel <i>Contending Forces: A Romance of Negro Life North and South</i>. In this critical biography Lois Brown documents for the first time Hopkins's early family life and her ancestral connections to eighteenth-century New England the African slave trade and twentieth-century race activism in the North.<br/><br/>Brown includes detailed descriptions of Hopkins's earliest known performances as a singer and actress; textual analysis of her major and minor literary works; information about her most influential mentors colleagues and professional affiliations; and details of her battles with Booker T. Washington which ultimately led to her professional demise as a journalist.<br/><br/>Richly grounded in archival sources Brown's work offers a definitive study that clarifies a number of inconsistencies in earlier writing about Hopkins. Brown re-creates the life of a remarkable woman in the context of her times revealing Hopkins as the descendant of a family comprising many distinguished individuals an active participant and supporter of the arts a woman of stature among professional peers and clubwomen and a gracious and outspoken crusader for African American rights.