Phillis Wheatley was the author of the first book of poetry by an African American, published in London in 1773. Prior to the book's debut, her first published poem, "On Messrs Hussey and Coffin," appeared in 1767 in the Newport Mercury. In 1770, her elegy on the death of George Whitefield, a celebrated evangelical Methodist minister who had traveled through theAmerican colonies, drew international attentionand the particular interest of Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. Whitefieldhad been the Countess's personal chaplain. Wheatleypublished numerous individual poems in addition to her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, but a proposed second volume of poetry never appeared, and the manuscript was lost after her death in 1784.