Hopkins’s teenage years saw her turn to stage performance, where she was highly regarded in both theatre and song. In 1879, when she was twenty, her family founded the Hopkins’ Colored Troubadours, a musical troupe that accompanied her on national tours where she starred in musical dramas including ones she wrote, including the play, Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad (later revised as Peculiar Sam).

By 1900 her interests turned to journalism and publishing, where she had a break-out year. Her short story “Talma Gordon” was published, which has been since lauded as the first African-American mystery story. Also published in 1900 was her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, which explored racist violence of post–Civil War America. That same year, she became editor-in-chief for Colored American Magazine, which was the widest circulating African-American literary publication prior to the rise of Crisis magazine, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The bulk of Hopkins’s writing output occurred during the four years of 1900 through 1903, when she wrote the four novels and numerous short stories for which she is best known. After 1905, she seems to have stopped writing for the most part (excepting the novella Topsy Templeton, published serially in 1916), and distanced herself from public life, although there are records of her surfacing periodically to lend support for a social cause or new publishing venture.

She spent the remainder of her years working as a stenographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pauline Hopkins died in 1930 from burns sustained in a house fire, leaving a legacy of civic action and literary triumph.

Suggested Discussion Questions
for Classroom Use

1. Of One Blood: or, The Hidden Self crosses several genres of fiction, including fantasy, adventure, horror, romance, and mystery. Do you think it’s important for a story to be defined clearly within one category of literature, or is it less important and that a book should be whatever the reader chooses to define it as? How would you describe this book to a friend?

2. This novel was originally published in a serialized format, meaning it was broken up and published over the course of several months, much like an episodic television show. What are some benefits of serializing a work rather than publishing it all at once as is traditionally done for a novel?

3. Author Pauline Hopkins was a firm believer in teaching people through reading. Her writing explored concepts of equality, race and gender relations, history, and social change, even while penning fiction that was filled with adventure, intrigue, and romance. Do you think it’s important to deliver learning opportunities or socially-conscious messages in fiction stories? Can you think of other examples of fiction that, besides being enjoyable for the story alone, also teach lessons of morality, safety, history, or of hope for change?