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In Contending Forces (1900), her best-known novel and her only work of fiction published in book form during her lifetime, Pauline Hopkins uses the conventions of the sentimental romance as she seeks to encourage social change. In its pages we encounter noble heroes and virtuous heroines,exotic settings, unsavory villains, melodramatic scenes, and a star-crossed love affair. Both an extraordinarily detailed examination of black life in nineteenth-century America and a richly textured and engrossing piece of fiction, Contending Forces remains one of the most important works producedby an African-American before World War I.