PAULINE HOPKINS
Pauline Hopkins’ work was largely unknown before 1988, but since her revival, she has become known as a a genre and gender-busting writer who was a pioneer in using traditional romance to explore themes of race. She is most well-known as the author of Contending Forces and Of One Blood; the latter is notable for its combination of black history and “the new psychology,” grounded in the mystical/spiritual realm.
Hopkins is also considered by many to be the most prolific female African-American writer and editor of the first decade of the 20th century. Even though her work as editor of The Colored American Magazine between 1900 and 1905 helped to lay the foundation for the Harlem Renaissance, she is often left off of lists of prominent writers of that movement.
​
Wikipedia
Detroit Photographic Company
Born in 1859 in Portland, Maine, Hopkins and her family moved to Boston soon after she was born; she ended up spending most of her life there. By 1880, she had written and was performing her first work, a musical entitled Slaves' Escape; or The Underground Railroad. Of One Blood, published in 1903, was her last novel publication (Dodson).
​
The bulk of her work was produced between 1900 and 1905 while she was serving as the editor of The Colored American Magazine (Dodson).
Hopkins, however, largely withdrew from literary life after Of One Blood's publication, and she died in obscurity. She was largely forgotten about until first, an article published in 1972 by Ann Allen Shockley and then a 1988 book written about nineteenth-century African American women writers helped to revitalize interest in her work. Hopkins spent the remainder of her life as stenographer at MIT. She died in 1930 from burns sustained in a house fire (Dodson).
WORKS CITED
​
Dodson, Howard. "Digital Schomberg African-American Women
Writers of the Nineteenth Century." New York Public Library, n.d.
Web. 27 Mar. 2017.