Phyllis Wheatley was abducted from the West African coast and sold to a Boston couple at roughly age seven. Their daughter taught the young slave to read, and within two years, Phyllis fluently read and wrote English and started learning Latin. When she was 18, her owners took her to London to publish a book of her poems, and – once disbelieving publishers and others were convinced that Phyllis had written them herself – she became famous on both sides of the Atlantic.