The Classic Slave Narratives by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

With a Revised and Updated Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The book consists of three sections: selected reviews of slave narratives, dating from 1750 to 1861 essays examining how such narratives serve as historical material and essays exploring. In the book The Classic Salve Narratives, edited and with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates, JR., contains a slave narrative Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Updated with the ninth edition of The Life of Olaudah Equiano, the last edition he revised and published in his lifetime. These amazing stories are not only first-person histories of the highest caliber, they are also a unique literary form that has given birth to the spirit, vitality, and vision of America's modern black writers. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of America's top experts in African American studies, presents four of these classic narratives that illustrate the real nature of black experience in slavery.įascinating and powerful, this collection includes four of the best-known examples: the lives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs (alias Linda Brent), Mary Price, and Olaudah Equiano (alias Gustavus Vassa).

No group of slaves anywhere, in any other era, has left such prolific testimony to the horror of bondage and servitude. Black slaves in the New World created a veritable 'literature of escape' depicting the overwhelming horrors of human bondage. The Classic Slave Narratives Henry Louis Gates (Jr.

A seminal volume of four classic slave narratives, including Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The History of Mary Price: A West Indian Slave, Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl, and The Life of Olaudah Equiano.īefore the end of the Civil War, more than one hundred former slaves had published moving stories of their captivity and escape, joined by a similar number after the war. The autobiographical narratives of black ex-slaves published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute the largest body of literature produced by slaves in human history.

The Classic Slave Narratives by Henry Louis Gates Jr.