Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins

Born into an educated free black family in Portland, Maine, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930) 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