Phillis Wheatley was enslaved at the time her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in 1773. A brilliant and precocious child, she first published her work in a local paper when she was just thirteen. By 1773 she’d amassed quite a collection of verse, and the publication—the first book of poetry by an African American—garnered her international fame and led to her manumission in 1774.