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Slave Narratives

Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and William L. Andrews

“These stories about the past are, like the Declaration of Independence, among the scriptures of the United States.”— The Philadelphia Inquirer

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview
Video Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom with David W. Blight

Story of the Week Harriet Ann Jacobs and Louisa M. Jacobs, “Building a School”

Interviews The War Before the War: Andrew Delbanco on fugitive slaves and the fragility of the American Republic
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No literary genre speaks as directly and as eloquently to the brutal contradictions in American history as the slave narrative. The works collected in this volume present unflinching portrayals of the cruelty and degradation of slavery while testifying to the African-American struggle for freedom and dignity. They demonstrate the power of the written word to affirm a person’s—and a people’s—humanity in a society poisoned by racism. Slave Narratives shows how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and, through their expression of anger, pain, sorrow, and courage, laid the foundations of the African-American literary tradition.

This volume collects ten works published between 1772 and 1864:
- Narratives by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1772) and Olaudah Equiano (1789) recount how they were taken from Africa as children and brought across the Atlantic to British North America.
- The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) provides unique insight into the man who led the deadliest slave uprising in American history.
- The widely read narratives by the fugitive slaves Frederick Douglass (1845), William Wells Brown (1847), and Henry Bibb (1849) strengthened the abolitionist cause by exposing the hypocrisies inherent in a slaveholding society ostensibly dedicated to liberty and Christian morality.
- The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) describes slavery in the North while expressing the eloquent fervor of a dedicated woman.
- Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) tells the story of William and Ellen Craft’s subversive and ingenious escape from Georgia to Philadelphia.
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is Harriet Jacobs’s complex and moving story of her prolonged resistance to sexual and racial oppression.
- The narrative of the “trickster” Jacob Green (1864) presents a disturbing story full of wild humor and intense cruelty.
Together, these works fuse memory, advocacy, and defiance into a searing collective portrait of American life before emancipation.

Slave Narratives contains a chronology of events in the history of slavery, as well as biographical and explanatory notes and an essay on the texts.

The editors of this volume are William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Humanities at Harvard University.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Slave Narratives is kept in print by a gift from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Video Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom with David W. Blight

Story of the Week Harriet Ann Jacobs and Louisa M. Jacobs, “Building a School”

Interviews The War Before the War: Andrew Delbanco on fugitive slaves and the fragility of the American Republic

Interviews Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom recasts the life of one of our major literary figures

Video Historian Eric Foner: “In some sense, Reconstruction never ended”

Interviews Ezra Greenspan on William Wells Brown: “The most rivetingly inventive, entertaining black writer of his era”

Interviews How antislavery writings reconnect us with one of the most crucial themes in American literary history
Table of Contents

James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw
Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, As related by Himself (1772)

Olaudah Equiano
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789)

Nat Turner
The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southhampton, VA. (1831)

Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845)

William Wells Brown
Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself (1847)

Henry Bibb
Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself. With an Introduction by Lucius C. Matlack (1849)

Sojourner Truth
Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828 (1850)

William and Ellen Craft
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860)

Harriet Ann Jacobs
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself (1861)

Jacob D. Green
Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky. Containing an Account of His Three Escapes, in 1839, 1846, and 1848 (1864)

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ISBN: 978-1-88301176-5 1035 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 114 Library of America Series

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