This paper focuses on the relation between the Methodist itinerant preacher George Whitefield and the literary publishing activities of African-Atlantic writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and John Marrant during the First Great Awakening period. The 18^th-century consumer revolution opened the age of mass publishing, which attracted writers and readers from across the boundaries of class, race and ethnicity. Whitefield reached people from different social and racial backgrounds in the North American coastal cities through an itinerant ministry that addressed them in the variety of their lived contexts. Such Puritan descendants as Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Coleman, and Benjamin Franklin aided Whitefield in this ministry and in his publishing activities.

The years of the British-American slave trade coincided with the early phase of the Protestant missionary movement led by Moravians and Methodists. About two hundred years later than the Jesuits, Protestants started their missionary work directed to the territories opened up through exploration as well as colonization in the West Indies and North America. Both in Britain and in North America, the emphasis fell on a religion of the heart, characteristic of the First Great Awakening. This ‘heart religion’ or ‘evangelicalism,’ as it is generally called, had much in common with a similar religious movement promoted with equal ardor in Europe, namely the Pietism that had spread from Lutheran Germany, as well as the associated movement of the Moravian Brethren in Bohemia, who retained a memory of the teaching of Jan Huss. The German Pietists influenced the Methodist movement in England led by John and Charles Wesley. Whitefield joined the Methodists while he was a student at Oxford and eventually became one of the leading Methodist ministers.

Some of the English planters in Barbados and in North America viewed with disquiet the evangelizing and Christianizing of slaves in the West Indies. In spite of the objections, the numbers of converts among slaves increased both in the West Indies and in North America throughout the 18thcentury. The fraught relations between religion and race in the 18^th-century Atlantic World have been clarified in the work of recent scholars such as Katharine Gerbner, Paul Lovejoy, and Paul Gilroy. Although racial boundaries were rather loose at the beginning of the century, they had become rigid by the time of the American Revolution, as is shown by references to race and ethnicity from the pen of the “enlightened” Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia.

In his Interesting Narrative, Equiano states that he heard Whitefield preach in Philadelphia, although his biographer Vincent Carretta estimates that this was in Savannah, Georgia. Savannah was Whitefield’s American home where he dedicated his utmost energy to building an orphanage, Bethesda. “An Elegiac Poem” composed by Phillis Wheatley on the death of Whitefield in 1770, was the breakthrough work that eventually led her to the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in London in 1773. Both Equiano and Wheatley belonged to the transatlantic evangelical circle and made their literary voices heard through its publication networks. This paper attempts to clarify how this network developed during and after the Great Awakening by closely studying several of the important 18^th century literary texts.