Slave Narratives Loa 114

The ten works collected in this volume demonstrate how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and laid the foundations of the African American literary tradition by expressing their in anger, pain, sorrow, and courage. Included in the volume: Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw; Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; The Confessions of Nat Turner; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Narrative of William W. Brown; Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb; Narrative of Sojouner Truth; Ellen and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Narrative of the Life of J. D.Green. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

This collection of slave narratives includes an additional chapter, "Ex-slave interviews and the historiography of slavery," originally published in 1984 in American Quarterly.

This genre, an exciting and too little known part of American literature and history, has played an important role in the development of such distinguished authors as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison.

Autobiographical accounts of former slaves compiled in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

This book offers a first-person perspective on the institution of slavery in America, providing powerful, engaging interviews from the WPA slave narrative collection that enable readers to gain a true sense of the experience of enslavement. Today's students understandably have a hard time imagining what life for slaves more than 150 years ago was like. The best way to communicate what slaves experienced is to hear their words directly. The material in this concise single-volume work illuminates the lives of the last living generation of enslaved people in the United States—former slaves who were interviewed about their experiences in the 1930s. Based on more than 2,000 interviews, the transcriptions of these priceless interviews offer primary sources that tell a diverse and powerful picture of life under slavery. The book explores seven key topics—childhood, marriage, women, work, emancipation, runaways, and family. Through the examination of these subject areas, the interviews reveal the harsh realities of being a slave, such as how slave women were at the complete mercy of the men who operated the places where they lived, how nearly every enslaved person suffered a beating at some point in their lives, how enslaved families commonly lost relatives through sale, and how enslaved children were taken from their parents to care for the children of slaveholders. The thematic organizational format allows readers to easily access numerous excerpts about a specific topic quickly and enables comparisons between individuals in different locations or with different slaveholders to identify the commonalities and unique characteristics within the system of slavery.

The pre-Civil War autobiographies of famous fugitives such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs form the bedrock of the African American narrative tradition. After emancipation arrived in 1865, former slaves continued to write about their experience of enslavement and their upward struggle to realize the promise of freedom and citizenship. Slave Narratives After Slavery reprints five of the most important and revealing first-person narratives of slavery and freedom published after 1865. Elizabeth Keckley's controversial Behind the Scenes (1868) introduced white America to the industry and progressive outlook of an emerging black middle class. The little-known Narrative of the life of John Quincy Adams, When in Slavery, and Now as a Freeman (1872) gave eloquent voice to the African American working class as it migrated from the South to the North in search of opportunity. William Wells Brown's My Southern Home (1880) retooled the image of slavery delineated in his widely-read antebellum Narrative and offered his reader a first-hand assessment of the South at the close of Reconstruction. Lucy Ann Delaney used From the Darkness Cometh the Light (1891) to pay tribute to her enslaved mother and to exemplify the qualities of mind and spirit that had ensured her own fulfillment in freedom. Louis Hughes's Thirty Years a Slave (1897) spoke for a generation of black Americans who, perceiving the spread of segregation across the South, sought to remind the nation of the horrors of its racial history and of the continued dedication of the once enslaved to dignity, opportunity, and independence.