The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin

<p>In 1867 Frances Anne Rollin a Black writer and teacher from South Carolina traveled to Boston to seek a publisher for her biography of famed Black abolitionist writer and Civil War veteran Martin R. Delany—the first full-length biography written by an African American. Beginning in January 1868 Rollin kept a diary while in Boston documenting her progression on Delany’s biography negotiations with publishers visits from friends attendance at lectures and readings and her marriage to William J. Whipper a Black politician and jurist. Rollin’s diary is one of the earliest known diaries by a Southern Black woman.<br/><br/>In this critical edition Jennifer Putzi offers the first complete transcription and annotation of Rollin’s diary along with a robust introduction providing important biographical historical cultural and literary contexts for readers. Rollin’s diary provides one of the fullest pictures of an African American woman as an author activist and well-connected and politically involved individual during the Reconstruction era—filling a gap in the literature and scholarly analysis of such preserved works by nineteenth-century African American women.</p>