LibGuides: African American Women Writers: Pauline Hopkins

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859-1930), African American playwright, novelist, journalist and editor, was born in 1859 in Portland, Maine. The daughter of Northrup and Sarah Allen Hopkins, she was raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and educated in public schools. Hopkins was 15 years old and a student at Girls High School when she first gained recognition for her writing, winning first prize in the William Wells Brown Contest, sponsored by the Congregational Publishing Society, for her essay 'Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedy'. The precocious Hopkins went on to write a musical drama, Aristocracy (1877), and a five-act play, Winona (1878), before she realised her first stage success with Slaves Escape; or The Underground Railroad, a musical drama in four acts about the quest of slaves to reach the North and establish their freedom. Produced by the Hopkins' Colored Troubadours, with her parents and herself in the cast, the play premiered at Boston's Oakland Gardens on 5 July 1880. Upon revising the play, Hopkins retitled it Peculiar Sam; or The Underground Railroad, after its central character. Favourably reviewed in its day, the work is now credited as one of the first musical dramas in the history of African American theatre.

Genre: Drama

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The Colored American Magazine : selected short stories, 1900-1909
The Colored American Magazine was founded in Boston by Walter M. Wallace in 1900. It was published by the Colored Co-Operative Publishing Company until 1904 when it was purchased by Fred R. Moore and moved to New York City. The magazine aimed to create an outlet for artists, scientists, and thinkers who were excluded and marginalized by white publications. It combined a celebration of Black business success with promotion of African American literary achievement. Editors Pauline Hopkins and Fred R. Moore disagreed about the direction the magazine should take. Hopkins pushed for a more middle-class intellectual agenda designed to express the pain of black America’s past, while Moore and Booker T. Washington leaned towards a “more conciliatory politics, shifting its focus away from racial injustices of the past and present toward positive coverage of African American achievements, particularly in the business world” (Sweeney). Ultimately, Hopkins was pushed out of her position, as the magazine’s content grew to differ from her political and literary interests.
Hagar's Daughter : A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice by Sarah A. Allen [pseudonym of Pauline Hopkins]
Set just before the outbreak of the American Civil War, Hagar's Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice takes place on the outskirts of Baltimore. When Hagar Sargeant returns home after four years of study at a seminary in the North, she meets Ellis Enson, an older gentleman and self-made man who resides at the stately Enson Hall. After a brief courtship, the pair are engaged to be married. As the wedding approaches, Hagar's mother dies unexpectedly, leaving Hagar the family estate. When a man from the deep south arrives claiming the young woman was born a slave, their lives are changed forever. Contending Forces is the story of Charles Montfort, a planter from Bermuda who moves with his family and slaves to North Carolina. There, he plans to free his slaves, drawing condemnation from his neighbors and risking violent retaliation. When a rumor spreads regarding his wife's ancestry, Montfort suspects Anson Pollack, a former friend, of planning to dispossess him.
Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest by Sarah A. Allen [pseudonym of Pauline Hopkins]
Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest opens on an island in the middle of Lake Erie, where White Eagle--recently displaced after the dissolution of the Buffalo Creek reservation--has built a home for himself and his African American wife. Adopting her son Judah, White Eagle establishes a life for his family apart from the prejudices and violence of American life. Their daughter Winona grows to be proud of her rich cultural heritage.

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Pauline E. Hopkins: a literary biography by Hanna Wallinger
Hanna Wallinger's discoveries break much new ground, especially regarding Hopkins's relationship with such notable men and women as Booker T. Washington and Anna Julia Cooper, her position in Boston's black women's club movement, her work with the Boston-based Colored American Magazine, and her concepts of race, gender, and class. Drawing on recently discovered letters, Wallinger sheds new light on the relationship between Hopkins and Booker T. Washington, particularly the acrimony surrounding Hopkins's departure from the Colored American Magazine. She discusses Hopkins's pseudonymous writings in addition to those written under the known alias Sarah A. Allen. Wallinger interprets Hopkins's play Peculiar Sam, her now famous novels (Contending Forces, Hagar's Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood), and the short stories, which have so far received little critical attention. This study also contains the little-known but important text A Primer of Facts. Republished here for the first time, it establishes Hopkins as an early advocate of black nationalism and one of the few women writers who joined this discourse. This important new study reveals her role at the center of crucial debates about the cultural politics of magazine editing, radical activism, and the early feminist movement.
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black daughter of the Revolution by Lois Brown
Born into an educated free black family in Portland, Maine, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was a pioneering playwright, journalist, novelist, feminist, and public intellectual, best known for her 1900 novel Contending Forces: A Romance of Negro Life North and South. 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. 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
Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream : an African American writer's (re)visionary gospel of success by Alisha R. Knight
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was perhaps the most prolific black female writer of her time. Between 1900 and 1904, writing mainly for "Colored American Magazine," she published four novels, at least seven short stories, and numerous articles that often addressed the injustices and challenges facing African Americans in post Civil War America. Scholars have frequently situated Hopkins within the domestic, sentimental tradition of nineteenth-century women's writing, with some critics observing that aspects of her writing, particularly its emphasis on the self-made man, seem out of place within the domestic tradition. Knight argues that Hopkins used this often-dismissed theme to critique American society's ingrained racism and sexism. In her fiction, she depicted heroes who fail to achieve success or must leave the United States to do so. Hopkins risked and eventually lost her position at "Colored American Magazine" by challenging black male leaders, liberal white philanthropists, and white racists and by conceiving a revolutionary treatment of the American Dream that placed her far ahead of her time.

African American Women Writers

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By Pauline Hopkins

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