From its origins in slavery to the present, literature has reflected African American life, thought, and freedom struggle.

Enslaved and free black poets and writers echoed Africans’ conversion to Christianity. Slave poet and preacher Jupiter Hammon of New York, in An Evening Thought, Salvation, by Christ, with Penitential Cries (1760), celebrated faith and hope. He hailed Christ's redemption of “every nation,” even “Ethiopians” like him, and called Boston bondwoman Phillis Wheatley the “Ethiopian Poetess.” In Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first book published by a black American, Wheatley invoked blacks’ humanity, singing “Negros, black as Cain, May be refin'd and join th’ angelic train.” Comparably, in The Hope for Liberty, Containing a Number of Poetical Pieces (1829), North Carolina slave George Moses Horton, voiced slaves’ desire to be free. “Along the dismal path” of slavery, Horton sang, freedom's “last beam of hope” guided them. Baltimore freewoman Frances E. W. Harper exposed slavery's cruelty in Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), as in “The Slave Mother.”

Slave narratives related experiences of bondage and freedom. Perhaps the best early one was The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself (1789), which had a 10th edition before his death. Equiano (1745–97) faced abduction at age eleven, the ordeal of the Middle Passage, slaving in Virginia, on British war ships, and in the Caribbean until 1766, when he bought his liberty and embraced abolitionism. “The abolition of slavery would be in reality an universal good” (Equiano, 2003, p. 336), he stated. The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831), a key female narrative, helped forge support for emancipation in the British West Indies. Thanks to his critical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), Douglass became American abolition's most respected spokesman. Harriet A. Jacobs, an Edenton, North Carolina fugitive who found refuge in the North, authored Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861).

Novels also appeared. Noted was Kentucky runaway William Wells Brown's Clotel, or the President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853). In the plot, after the death of President Thomas Jefferson, Clotel, his mulatto daughter is sold.