First published in May 1900, the Colored American Magazine provided a pioneering forum for black literary talent previously stifled by lack of encouragement and opportunity. Not only a prolific writer for the journal, Pauline Hopkins also served as one of its powerful editorial forces. This volume of her magazine novels, which appeared serially in the journal between March 1901 and November 1903, reveals Hopkins' commitment to fiction as a vehicle for social change. She weaves important political themes into the narrative formulas of nineteenth-century dime-store novels and story papers, which emphasize suspense, action, complex plotting, multiple and false identities, and the use of disguise. Offering both instruction and entertainment, Hopkins' novels also expose the limitations of popular American narrative forms when telling the stories of black characters.

The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth- Century Black Women Writers series, under the general editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has rescued the voice of an entire segment of the African-American literary tradition by offering volumes of compelling and rare works of fiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, essays, and journalism, written by nineteenth-century back women.

The three novels published in the Schomburg Library for the first time since their appearance in The Colored American Magazine from 1901 to 1903 not only represent an early example of black people producing popular fiction for and about themselves, but extend the cultural and political discourse introduced in Harper's novel [Iola Leroy].