Thomas Detter was the most articulate of the remarkable blacks who lived in nineteenth-century Nevada and one of the most articulate in the West. -Elmer A. Rusco, Good Time Coming: Black Nevadans in the Nineteenth Century. The rediscovery of Thomas Detter’s Nellie Brown, or The Jealous Wife, with Other Sketches, published in 1871, could be to contemporary American Studies what the discovery of gold was to the development of the American West. -from the introduction by Frances Smith Foster. This collection includes a novella, two short stories, and six essays. The title story, the first novel written by an African American in the West, takes place in Virginia and addresses adultery and divorce, subjects considered radical and risqui at that time. Equally provocative are the Other Sketches. These include two short stories: The Octoroon Slave of Cuba,
an alternative to tragic mulatto fiction, and Uncle Joe,
an African-American folktale. The six personal essays, including My Trip to Baltimore and Give the Negro a Chance,
are as compelling now as they were then in depicting the West after Reconstruction. Thomas Detter was born around 1826 near Washington DC into a free, middle-class family. After migrating to the West, he became a successful frontier businessman, gold miner, journalist, civil rights leader, and Methodist minister and was a distinguished western African-American writer of the reconstructionist period. Frances Smith Foster is a professor of English and women’s studies at Emory University. She is the author of Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892.