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How many slave narratives were published before the end of the American Civil War?

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Phillis Wheatley's first book of poetry — African American literature Frontispiece and title page of *Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral* (1773) by Phillis Wheatley, the first Black woman to become a poet of note in the United States. The portrait on which the frontispiece's engraving is based is often attributed to Scipio Moorhead, an Black artist and writer who, like Wheatley, was enslaved and living in Boston.

Between 1760 and the end of the American Civil War in 1865, approximately 100 autobiographies of fugitive or former slaves were published. These slave narratives became a cornerstone of African American literature, serving as powerful tools for the abolition movement by providing firsthand accounts of the harsh realities of enslavement.12