Editor Cedrick May’s The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon offers a complete look at the literary achievements of one of the founders of African American literature: Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806?), the first Black writer to be published in what became the United States of America.

With this collection—the most comprehensive volume on Hammon’s works to date—May carefully reconstructs the historical, political, social, and religious contexts that shaped Hammon’s essays and poems throughout the late eighteenth century. This fresh presentation and insightful reevaluation sets down a new rubric for how Hammon, an enslaved person from New York, can be studied and appreciated among literary scholars and readers alike.