Gonzaga University English professor Donna Campbell's nineteenth century American Novel Web site includes this page on Harper, replete with selected bibliography, list of published works, and links to Project Muse and American Literature sites.

The 19CWWW Etext Library: Frances E.W. Harper
http://www.unl.edu/legacy/19cwww/books/elibe/harper/harchloe.htm

This site, maintained by Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, features a special page on nineteenth-century American women writers. Check this site to read poems by Frances E.W. Harper. It offers links to other sites on the Web exclusively devoted to nineteenth-century women's literature, reviews, excerpts and interviews, journals and publishers.

The Underground Railroad Site: Frances E.W. Harper
http://education.ucdavis.edu/new/stc/lesson/socstud/railroad/FranBio.htm

This site, maintained by two students at the University of California at Davis, offers a brief biography of Harper and her role as a prolific writer and lecturer for the

African American Writers: Online E-Texts
http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/afroonline.htm

This page is part of the Internet School Library Media Center Web site, developed by James Madison University. It is an excellent place to begin research on African American authors of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. It includes biographical and bibliographical links to Frances E. W. Harper sites, as well as other prominent African American authors, including Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Phyllis Wheatley.

Voices from the Gaps: Frances Harper
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/FrancesEllenWatkinsHarper.html

This site from the University of Minnesota features information on the lives and work of women writers of color. It includes writing by Harper, excellent biographical information, a selected bibliography, and information on dozens of other authors, including Gwendolyn Brooks, bell hooks, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Bharati Mukherjee.

John Keene's Notable African Americans in Arts and Letters
http://pages.nyu.edu/~jrk3150/afro.html

This in-progress site features biographical pages on Frances Harper, Phyllis Wheatley, Beauford Delaney, and R. Nathaniel Dett.

BIOGRAPHY
Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911), author of the first published short story by an African American, was born to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland. She was orphaned by the age of three and raised by her uncle, a teacher and radical advocate for civil rights, who founded the William Watkins Academy for free colored children. Harper then attended the Academy for Negro Youth and the rigorous education she received, along with her uncle's political activism, left a lasting influence on her poetry.

She was educated as a teacher and in 1850 she began teaching at schools in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but found herself unhappy trying to control a classroom of what she described as "fifty-three untrained little urchins." She quit her job as a teacher and began to support herself as a professional lecturer for the abolitionist cause, hired at first by the Maine Anti-Slavery Society.

Harper's first book of poems, Forest Leaves, was published in 1845. It wasn't until 1854, when Harper was exiled from Maryland because of new slavery laws, that she began her own brand of activism - speeches that included her own prose and poetry. Greatly moved by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, she published a volume of Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects in 1854 containing several classic antislavery poems such as "The Slave Auction" and "The Fugitive's Wife," which went into twenty printings in her lifetime.

During Harper's long career at the lecture podium, she published many of her essays written for the New York City Anti-Slavery Society, the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and other temperance, civil rights, and world peace organizations. For more than half a century, she involved herself in radical protest demonstrations against racial discrimination and used her experiences in her writing.

Harper produced almost as many volumes of poetry and long fiction as she did essays and lectures, but she published few short stories. The first was "The Two Offers," in the September-October 1859 issue of The Anglo-African Magazine, which advertised that it was "devoted to Literature, Science, Statistics, and the advancement of the cause of human freedom." In this work of short fiction, Harper argues that marriage is not the only option for intelligent women and that there are worse fates than becoming "an old maid." She also published books throughout this period, including Sketches of Southern Life (1872) and Iola Leroy: or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), which was the first novel published by a black woman in the United States.