George Moses Horton defied remarkable odds to become the ONLY poet to publish a book before he had learned how to write, and the first enslaved person to publish a book in the South (he went on to publish two while enslaved). George learned what he could and when he could from scraps of discarded paper and a Wesley hymnal. He lived in slavery for sixty-eight years in North Carolina until he was liberated after the Civil War in 1865.