The Garies And Their Friends

by Frank J Webb

Overview

"The Garies and Their Friends" by way of Frank J. Webb is a groundbreaking novel that turned into posted in 1857, making it one of the earliest novels written with the aid of an African American. The author, Frank J. Webb, turned into an African American abolitionist and intellectual. This novel is sizable for its portrayal of the lives of free African Americans within the pre-Civil War United States. The story revolves around the lives of the Garie own family, a mixed-race own family together with Clarence Garie, a rich white Southerner, and his quadroon wife, Emily. The Garies lead a relaxed lifestyle in Philadelphia but face the social demanding situations and prejudices of the time due to their racial identification. The novel explores themes of racial identity, social magnificence, and the complicated dynamics of interracial relationships. As the Garie family faces societal discrimination, the narrative additionally introduces the reader to the reports of other loose African Americans, dropping light at the multifaceted struggles of the African American community in the antebellum North. Webb's novel is terrific for its nuanced portrayal of characters, difficult racial stereotypes regular at some point of that technology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789361152450
Publisher:	Double 9 Books
Publication date:	02/01/2024
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Francis Johnson Webb, an American author, poet, and essayist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His work, The Garies and Their Friends (1857), was the second novel published by an African American, and the first to depict the daily lives of free blacks in the North. Frank Webb was born in Philadelphia on March 21, 1828. He was the fifth and youngest child of Francis Webb (1788-1829) and Louisa Burr Webb. His maternal grandfather, former US Vice President Aaron Burr, was confirmed by DNA testing in 2018. Webb had one brother, John (1823-1904), and three sisters: Elizabeth (1818-1888), Ann (1820-1884), and Mary (1824-1826). Webb's mother, Louisa Charlotte Burr, was Aaron Burr's daughter. She and her brother John Pierre Burr, a well-known black activist in Philadelphia, were born to an East Indian woman who worked as a governess in Burr's family. Louisa Burr Webb spent the majority of her life working for Mrs. Elizabeth Powel Francis Fisher, a renowned Philadelphia society matron with strong ties to the city's oldest families and the mother of prominent Philadelphia businessman Joshua Francis Fisher. After Francis Webb died, Louisa remarried and changed her name to Louisa Darius.

Read an Excerpt

"It is remarkable that, even as the study of African American literature and culture has become central to any number of projects within American intellectual life, so little attention has been given a work as significant as Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends."—from the 1997 introduction by Robert Reid-Pharr

Johns Hopkins University Press