Milford, New Hampshire (March 15, 1825 -June 28, 1900) age 75 yrs

Harriet E. Wilson was born free in New Hampshire. She was orphaned when young. She was then bound until the age of 18 as an indentured servant. Wilson was the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859. It was published in Boston, Massachusetts. It was not widely known. The fictional autobiographical novel was discovered in 1982 by the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who documented it as the first African American novel published in the United States. His discovery and the novel gained national attention.